The Sudeten War: History of the World after an Alternate 1938

[Onkel Willie]

After reading the Wikipedia article on Turtledove's alternate history series concerning WW II erupting over the Sudetenland Crisis, I decided to do my own take on how such a world might develop. This is the first installment of that TL:

The Sudeten War

Chapter I: Rise of the Nazis and the Sudeten Crisis, 1933-1938.​

In 1933, the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany as millions of voters had made them the largest party in the Reichstag. At long last President Hindenburg had been left no other choice but to appoint party leader Adolf Hitler Chancellor in January. After the Reichstag fire that was deemed an act of arson by a Dutch communist, the Reichstag Fire Decree imposed in February rescinded most civil liberties. The subsequent Enabling Act passed in March empowered Hitler to pass laws without the Reichstag’s consent. Opponents intending to vote against these laws were intimidated or outright arrested.

The basis was laid for a dictatorship as Hitler could now simply ban all other parties. The entire country was rapidly Nazified: state parliaments and the Reichsrat (federal upper house) were abolished and their powers transferred to the central government. Civil organizations all received Nazi leaders and merged with the party or were dissolved, and for the media it was much the same with Propaganda Minister Goebbels controlling newspapers, radio, cinema, theatres, music and so on. All symbols of the Weimar Republic were removed and replaced by the swastika and other Nazi symbols. Jews were fired from their jobs as teachers, professors, judges, magistrates and government officials. A deficit spending based economic policy was initiated to rapidly combat unemployment, earning public support.

Their economic policy also included rapid militarization against the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. This military build-up, the remilitarization of the Rhineland and Germany’s questionable involvement in the Spanish Civil War were not protested against by Britain and France, diplomatically or otherwise. On the contrary, nobody so much as batted an eyelid when Hitler reintroduced conscription in 1935 and announced plans to expand the Wehrmacht to 550.000 men in 36 divisions. It was much the same when he remilitarized the Rhineland against the provisions of the punitive Treaty of Versailles. The diktat that Hitler hated so much.

Hitler was encouraged by the passive attitude of Paris and London. In February 1938, Hitler emphasised to Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg the need for Germany to secure its frontiers. Schuschnigg scheduled a plebiscite regarding Austrian independence for March 13th, but Hitler sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg on March 11th demanding that he hand over all power to the Austrian Nazi Party or face an invasion. German troops entered Austria the next day, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the populace. Again no-one spoke out against this blatant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Believing the British and French wouldn’t act and would try to keep the peace, Hitler felt confident enough to plan his next expansionist move targeting Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a multi-ethnic republic – made up of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia – that had emerged from the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Over three million of its inhabitants, roughly 23% of the total population, were ethnic Germans who hadn’t been consulted on whether they wanted to be Czechoslovak citizens. Most of them lived in the Sudetenland region on the borders. Though the constitution guaranteed equal rights for all citizens and some progress was made to integrate Germans and other minorities, they continued to be underrepresented in the government and the army. The Great Depression hit the highly industrialized and export oriented Sudeten Germans hardest of all, with 60% of all unemployed in Czechoslovakia being German. The Sudeten German Party led by Konrad Henlein, an instrument of the Nazis, demanded autonomy, to which the government replied it was willing to grant more minority rights but was reluctant to grant more autonomy. In May 1938, the Sudeten German Party won 88% of all ethnic German votes.

For much of the summer Hitler was busy planning a limited war against Czechoslovakia no later than October 1st that year (he was determined to act before Czechoslovak defences were completed and before British rearmament would be complete circa 1941-’42) whilst accelerating naval expansion, hoping to have a credible deterrent against the British. Tensions were rising and a war seemed like a distinct possibility. The French were as keen as the British to avoid war and, unwilling to face the Germans alone, took their lead from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Government. Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet was told by Polish ambassador Lukasiewicz that Poland wouldn’t act if France intervened to defend Czechoslovakia and would never permit Soviet forces to pass through its territory for that purpose either. Some later Polish proposals to the contrary, i.e. offering Polish support, were not responded to by London and Paris.

The crisis escalated over the summer with the German press accusing the Czechoslovak government of atrocities against the Sudeten Germans. It got to the point that on September 12th at the Nuremberg Rally, Hitler made outrageous accusations that Czechoslovak President Beneš wanted to gradually exterminate the Germans and that he was suppressing the Slovak, Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian minorities of his country too. In the meantime, the British had already pressured Edvard Beneš to request a mediator. This mediator was Lord Runciman, who arrived in Prague on August 3rd with instructions to convince Beneš to agree to something acceptable to the Sudeten Germans. Two weeks prior on July 20th, Bonnet had informed the Czechoslovak ambassador that France would publicly declare its support to help the negotiations, but that his country wasn’t willing to go to war over the matter. Hitler hoped the Czechoslovaks would remain adamant, giving Britain and France the rationalization to abandon them to their devices.

In the meantime developments were taking place in Moscow that would give the Sudetenland Crisis an entirely new direction. The Soviet Union’s People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov was the namesake of the 1929 Litvinov Protocol. This protocol provided for immediate implementation of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact by its signatories, thereby renouncing war as a part of national foreign policy (specifically between the Soviet Union and several neighbouring countries). Litvinov wanted peace and was the leading voice for the official Soviet policy of collective security with the Western powers against Nazi Germany. Ironically, his pursuit of peace led to war.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the war begins.

Chapter II: Course to War, September 1938.​

Litvinov had a scheduled meeting with department heads on Tuesday September 13th, but he couldn’t get to his office in Moscow because his car wouldn’t start. With nothing to do, Litvinov phoned Stalin and said “we absolutely have to do something about the Czechoslovak situation and stop German fascist aggression.” Stalin responded that he was interested in hearing Litvinov’s propositions and would send a car over to fetch him that evening.

Litvinov was taken to Stalin’s dacha in the town of Kuntsevo, the true centre of power of the Soviet Union: located in a densely wooded birch forest, its defences included a double-perimeter fence, camouflaged 30 millimetre anti-aircraft guns, and a security force of three hundred NKVD special troops. The grounds included lemon and apple trees, a rose garden, a small pond, and a watermelon patch which Stalin liked to cultivate. There was also a sports ground for playing gorodki. Litvinov was taken through the rectangular dining room decorated with images of Lenin and Gorky – where Stalin would have meetings and late night dinners with the politburo – to the study that “the boss” seldom left and where he would receive foreign guests in the future.

During the evening hours of Tuesday September 13th 1938, Litvinov explained to Stalin his conviction that the Soviet Union should support Prague, a legitimate move given the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance that was in place. More specifically, he proposed that the Soviet Union should first publicly declare it would see any German annexation of territory agreed to by Czechoslovakia under diplomatic pressure and without its prior consent as an act of unprovoked aggression. This would compel the USSR to live up to its agreement to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid and he believed that this would subsequently encourage France and Britain to address Germany more sternly as they’d want to avoid being put to shame in the diplomatic arena and in public opinion. After all, how would it appear if the two leading Western powers abandoned an ally in Eastern Europe in the face of German threats and left her rescue up to the Russian bear? A subsequent counterproposal would be a neutral League of Nations inspection how much of Berlin’s allegations, if any, were true. If Germany rejected this and if there was a war after all, it would be a short one that would keep Germany contained, with perhaps consequences for the stability of the Nazi regime. In short, this would revive the policy of collective security.

Stalin agreed with the plans in principle, though he put his own opportunistic spin on it that he didn’t tell Litvinov about: he would attempt to sabotage the appeasement policy by openly siding with Prague. If this resulted in a wider European war – which Stalin considered likely, given that the other choice was geopolitical irrelevance – then France and Britain would bear the brunt of the fighting as the Soviet Union didn’t directly border Germany anywhere. He hoped that this would keep Germany, Britain and France busy and exhaust them, allowing them to expand his sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He estimated there was a good chance of this happening given that, although German rearmament was incomplete, British and French rearmament wasn’t complete either. He estimated a war would last a year, maybe two, during which no-one would have the means to deal with him. A strong USSR undamaged by war would stand to gain with the three major powers too weakened by war to consider challenging it.

On September 15th, two days after the meeting between Stalin and Litvinov at Kuntsevo, the Soviet foreign ministry issued a communique that was also published on the frontpage of Pravda. It said that the USSR would view a German annexation of the Sudetenland region a groundless, indefensible act of aggression, even if Czechoslovakia appeared to agree under diplomatic pressure. As an alternative, Moscow proposed League of Nations observers to ascertain how much truth there was to the German allegations of atrocities. If anything of the sort proved to be true, a next step could be autonomy for the Sudeten Germans under League of Nations supervision. If Czechoslovakia could make improvements in its treatment of its German minority, if this was deemed necessary to begin with, this could also be done under the auspices of the League of Nations. This way, the rights of the Sudeten Germans would be improved within Czechoslovakia, making an annexation unnecessary. This crucially meant the country would keep its fortified border regions.

While Czechoslovakia was informed by the Soviet ambassador in Prague several hours beforehand, Moscow’s announcement came as a surprise to Berlin, London and Paris. Chamberlain arrived in Germany that same day to meet with Hitler on the Obersalzberg at his Alpine chalet, the Berghof. Hitler emphasized that the Sudeten Germans had to be allowed the right to exercise national self-determination and be able to join Germany. Despite recent events, Hitler insisted on having this discussion and tried to provoke Chamberlain into explicitly stating whether he was in favour of or opposed to the national self-determination of the Sudeten Germans. He couldn’t goad the British Prime Minister into answering that question directly.

Instead, Chamberlain declared that the Soviet intervention on Prague’s behalf “[has] changed the situation like a bull in a china shop and necessitates a new approach, which requires that I further discuss the situation with my cabinet. We also need to await the response of the Czech government and factor it into the course to be taken.” Intuitively Hitler had gauged the Soviet action correctly and responded: “The Soviet move changes nothing. They won’t intervene, not meaningfully anyway. Stalin only intends to create conflict between us to strengthen his own position. An international war over the matter is what he’s after as this benefits him. It’ll enable him to Bolshevize everything east of the Vistula and north of the Turkish Straits. You surely don’t want this, do you, Herr Chamberlain?”

Chamberlain nonetheless returned to London, reporting that nothing meaningful had been agreed to and then went on to discuss the Soviet proposals with his cabinet. While in hindsight Hitler had correctly guessed what Stalin’s true opportunistic motivations were, Chamberlain considered the Führer’s appraisal of them grounded in unbased cynicism. Believing Hitler was truly concerned with the wellbeing of the Sudeten Germans, he considered League of Nations oversight an excellent solution. The following day, September 16th, French Prime Minister Daladier arrived in London and he agreed that the Soviet proposals had merit, but said he had to discuss this with his government. After their meeting adjourned, Daladier returned home and Paris adopted the same position as London did.

In the meantime, Hitler was irate about the Soviet intervention as he was certain the puny democratic governments of Britain and France would’ve just given him what he wanted without Moscow’s meddling. On the other hand, however, he’d already been severely vexed by the initial Anglo-French attempts to mediate as he’d hoped to turn the affair into “a splendid little war.” This was the perfect excuse to unilaterally abandon the talks which, in Hitler’s words, were going to lead to “a preservation of the status quo under the League of Nations, with only minor changes to our advantage and more Soviet interference.” He knew perfectly well there were no atrocities being committed against Sudeten Germans, which meant the League of Nations wouldn’t legitimize an annexation.

Hitler resolved that, no matter what variation of the proposed diplomatic solution the French and British agreed on, Germany would go to war on October 1st (he was not interested in the slightest in proposals for the federalization of Czechoslovakia, which would’ve given the Sudeten Germans a lot of autonomy). He couldn’t be persuaded to follow a non-violent course anymore by anyone. Even his second hand man Hermann Goering couldn’t talk him out of it anymore. This was the only way to get what Hitler wanted and he didn’t see a serious risk in it, disbelieving Britain, France and the Soviet Union would fight over a German annexation of the Sudetenland region. Last minute compromise solutions and proposals for further talks coming in from the British and French embassies confirmed Hitler’s derisive opinion on London and Paris.

He ignored their repeated attempts to resume negotiations and left the job of keeping up appearances to his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who kept assuring French ambassador André François-Poncet and British ambassador Sir Nevile Meyrick Henderson that “the Führer is studiously reading your proposals and will take his time to deal with them appropriately. He appreciates your desire for a peaceful solution.” What Hitler told Mussolini during a meeting at the Brenner Pass came closer to revealing his true intentions: “If we take what we want by force the French and British will not act, especially if you and I march together. Years of peace have made them complacent and weak. Stalin will think twice before going to war against the Anti-Comintern Pact by himself. If he does go to war, I hope there’s someone with an ounce of intelligence in Whitehall and the Elysée who’ll explain that they should join our crusade to eradicate Judeo-Bolshevism from the face of the Earth so communist provocateurs don’t stir up trouble in their own colonial empires.” Mussolini replied: “If there are two camps, for and against Prague, Italy has chosen its side.” He thereby clearly implied Italy would support Germany in this crisis.

The complete truth was that Hitler had begun preparing for war within days of the Pravda publication that had issued the Soviet Union’s position on the matter. Berlin denounced criticisms of aggression vis-à-vis its mobilization by pointing out this was a defensive military build-up in response to Czechoslovakia doing the same by carrying out a partial mobilization. The Sudetendeutsches Freikorps commenced with a so-called retaliatory campaign in self-defence against the entirely fictional atrocities committed against the Sudeten Germans by Prague. In reality, their attacks were little more than terrorism. The SS and SD carried out Operation Himmler, a false flag operation to create the appearance of Czechoslovakian aggression to justify a declaration of war. The most famous of these was the attack on the Bautzen Radio Station on September 30th 1938. SS men in Czechoslovak uniforms took over the radio station and broadcast a short anti-German message. Dead bodies from Buchenwald concentration camp inmates were dressed in German and Czechoslovak uniforms to make it look like there had been some fighting.

On October 1st, in a speech in the Reichstag, Hitler cited the 21 border incidents as justification for Germany's “defensive” action against Czechoslovakia: “I can no longer find any willingness on the part of the Czechoslovak government to conduct serious negotiations with us. These proposals for mediation have failed because in the meanwhile there, first of all, came as an answer the sudden Czechoslovak general mobilization, followed by more Czechoslovak atrocities. These were again repeated last night. Recently in one night there were as many as twenty-one frontier incidents: last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious. I have, therefore, resolved to speak to Prague in the same language that it for months past has used toward us. This night for the first time Czechoslovak regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 AM we have been returning fire. I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.” The Sudeten War had begun.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time!

Chapter III German Invasion and Soviet Intervention, 1-10 October 1938.​

In the two weeks leading up to the formal declaration of war, Germany mobilized about 600.000 men in 36 infantry divisions, 2.000 tanks, 3.000 artillery guns and 2.500 aircraft. All-in-all, by adding Waffen SS and Landwehr divisions and support from SA stormtroopers and police units the Germans managed to mobilize a force of three quarters of a million men, totalling fifty divisions. They faced 35 infantry divisions, 500 tanks, 2.200 artillery guns and 880 aircraft from the Czechoslovakian armed forces. The Germans had greater numbers on their side and would’ve won in a matter of weeks, maybe three months at the most, without foreign involvement.

Contrary to Hitler’s speech, offensive German operations had already begun at five o’clock in the morning on October 1st, 45 minutes earlier than he claimed German forces had been “returning fire.” This didn’t come as a complete surprise to the Czechoslovakian army as they’d already carried out a partial mobilization, moving troops to the border fortifications and observing German movements on the other side of the border. They were powerless to do anything about it since they were under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon first to avoid being seen as the aggressor. The government of four star general Jan Syrový, who’d become Prime Minister on September 22nd, had issued a total mobilization order two days prior.

The Czechoslovak border fortifications were incomplete: the first stage of construction was to be complete by 1941-’42 and the entire system only by the early fifties. Nonetheless, 264 heavy blockhouses and 10.014 light pillboxes, 20% of the heavy objects and 70% of the light ones, were complete while the incomplete ones were at least useable as shelters and storages. The heavy fortifications had additional protection by being covered with boulders and debris, stopping most shells before they’d reach the concrete. The heavy defences had machine guns and artillery, some mounted in cupolas, with part of the fire directed laterally to stop the enemy from engaging from the flanks or from behind. The strongest ones had indirect fire mortars and heavy cannon mounts. Enemy forces trying to pass between the heavy blockhouses would face resistance from the pillboxes and would encounter anti-tank and anti-infantry barricades as well as machine gun and artillery fire. The line functioned as intended despite its incomplete status, with the defenders holding the Germans back for days and inflicting serious casualties by exploiting the defences and the terrain cleverly, carrying out strategic withdrawals where these were required.

Holding back the Germans for as long as possible and inflicting severe casualties, whilst trying to preserve their own forces when possible through strategic retreats, was the strategy of the Czechoslovak military leadership. They realized full well that in the medium to long term Germany’s greater industrial base and manpower pool would simply overwhelm them. Therefore they had to fight smart to prolong their ability to continue the war effort and hopefully make the enemy bleed enough to come to a peace agreement. Since they knew that Hitler, unfortunately, was unlikely to be deterred by any losses (though they hoped those around him might be), prolonging the fight served the second purpose of giving Prague’s allies time to mobilize and intervene. Therefore their effort had to be credible since nobody was going to go to war over a lost cause.

The advantageous materiel superiority of the Wehrmacht meant Prague absolutely needed allies to achieve victory. In terms of manpower the situation was roughly equal, but the Germans had four times as many tanks and almost three times as many aircraft. Though the LT-35 light tank was superior to the Panzer I and Panzer II the Germans used, this was nullified by the number of German tanks facing them. In the air it was much the same. The Czechoslovak air force had 880 airplanes and 450 of those were fairly modern Avia B-534 biplane fighters that surprisingly managed to hold their own against Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighters. The biplane Letov S-328 – with four forward facing 7.92 machine guns, two more in the rear cockpit and 500 kg of bombs – was a good attack aircraft and blew up its share of Panzers. Though some dogfights were spectacularly won by Czechoslovak pilots, the Luftwaffe gained air superiority and the Czechoslovak air force was spread out and kept hidden, only to be used when absolutely necessary. A handful of bombing raids against German targets just across the border were carried out by Avia B-71 fast bombers (license produced versions of the Soviet Tupolev SB).

Once Fall Grün (Case Green) was put into effect on October 1st 1938, the Luftwaffe bombed Czechoslovak fortifications, roads and main railways towards the front, after which their invasion commenced. In the northern theatre the German advance was checked after only eight kilometres, making it the most successful Czechoslovak defence. In the centre German forces advanced more steadily until they hit fortifications west of Pilsen, which took them four days to breach, forcing a Czechoslovak withdrawal to a secondary line southwest of Prague. In the south, German forces advanced towards and subsequently besieged defences around Brno and Bratislava, facing spirited defenders.

Within ten days the frontline had been pushed to the outskirts of Prague. Hitler wanted it to be over and threatened to destroy the country’s capital, hoping to bully the enemy into declaring it an open city so it would be spared. He fully expected that to happen since the Czechoslovak government would be mindful of the cultural treasures of the city: architecture from the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods, several museums, galleries, theatres and other historical exhibits. Besides that, a German bombardment would of course inflict terrible civilian casualties.

Hitler wanted to spare the city, if possible, for several reasons. Firstly, he had pictured a triumphant military parade in the historical city, which wouldn’t be so glorious if it was set against the backdrop of blackened ruins. Besides that, a long siege or house to house battle would lengthen the war, which was a problem for several reasons: the Germans only had fuel reserves for three weeks of intense combat; it would require manpower, which would force the Wehrmacht to pull older reservists in their forties, that were less well equipped and trained, from the incomplete Siegfried Line; and if the invasion didn’t go quick enough then he couldn’t present the world a fait accompli, increasing the risk of outside interference and a wider, more drawn out conflict Germany wasn’t yet equipped to fight.

Foreign intervention became a matter of time when the Soviet Union declared war on October 5th (after a four day marathon politburo session the Soviet leader ordered as he was having last minute doubts). Stalin promised a contingent of 350.000 men, adhering to the alliance between the two countries, and subsequent mobilization orders were issued in the Kiev and Odessa military districts. Meanwhile, Romania had given the Soviet Air Force permission to fly through their airspace to transport troops and supplies to Czechoslovakia. Soviet forces slowly started massing in Slovakia near Košice. As long as air transport was the only way for the Red Army to get in troops, their build-up would be fed by a small, slow trickle. Moscow, however, was also trying to negotiate overland corridors, guarded by the Romanian Army, through which they would be able to send troops and supplies. As time passed it looked like the Romanians would agree as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the other two members of the Little Entente, were pressuring them into it. That would send a message to Hungary, deterring it from launching a revanchist war of its own, which was the reason for the mutual defence arrangement of the three powers (it didn’t, however, scare Poland as it occupied the disputed Zaolzie region over Czechoslovakia’s protests).

At 10:00 AM on October 10th, Hitler had a meeting at the Bendlerblock, an office complex in Berlin used by several departments of the OKW and the OKH as well as the Abwehr military intelligence agency. Hitler met with OKW chief General Wilhelm Keitel, OKH chief General Walther von Brauchitsch, OKH chief of staff Franz Halder and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering, his right-hand man. Hitler declared a “a Bolshevik ulcer is growing in Slovakia. If we force a Czechoslovak collapse, be it a military collapse or a loss of political will to continue, we can surgically remove it. If not, the ulcer will burst with results we can scarcely foresee, never mind act upon. It could even encourage the cowardly French and British to act. A two-front war must be avoided at all costs.” In other words, if the enemy was forced out of the war quickly then the Soviets would be forced out too. If not, then the Soviet presence would grow to the point that the Germans wouldn’t have the upper hand in terms of men and equipment anymore. That would make this a long conflict with an unpredictable outcome and possible Anglo-French intervention, which would inevitably result in defeat.

The decision was made to bomb Prague despite its cultural and historical significance and with no regard whatsoever for its remaining civilian population. Hermann Goering promised his Luftwaffe would raze the city to the ground saying “we will annihilate Prague and its people will suffer. If this doesn’t break them, I don’t know what will.” On Tuesday October 11th at 09:00 AM a fleet of 75 bombers – composed of Heinkel He 111s, Dornier Do 17s, Junkers Ju 88s and Ju-52s – took flight. Bf 109 fighters kept enemy fighters at bay and Stuka dive bombers suppressed anti-aircraft guns. They dropped about sixty tonnes of bombs on the city, killing 552 civilians and wounding thousands as well as inflicting terrible damage. Entire boroughs in the city centre had been levelled. The bombing was condemned by several governments worldwide, most prominently by the Soviet Union, Britain and France of course. It didn’t have the intended effect of forcing a surrender, but stiffened resistance instead.

After his meeting at the Bendlerblock, Hitler’s plane departed with a southward heading the same day as he believed he could lead the war effort better if he was closer to the front. He planned to lead the military from the Berghof, his Alpine chalet, while remaining in control of politics through the “Little Chancellery” in the nearby town of Bischofswiesen. Little did he know that a plot was being forged against him. In fact, the plane taking him to Berchtesgaden had an object on board that could’ve killed the Führer if it had done its job. The bomb hidden in a briefcase with a false bottom didn’t go off and wasn’t discovered either, being discretely removed by one of the conspirators. No-one knows how the war would’ve gone if it had done what it was supposed to.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the war expands.

Chapter IV: The German Resistance, the Battle of Zlín and Allied Intervention, 10-15 October 1938.​

The German resistance movement against the Nazi regime was in agreement that it was time to topple the regime, but not in agreement on how to proceed. Given the fragmented nature of this resistance that was no surprise. Some had secretly resisted the regime from day one out of principle grounds such as opposition to its racist or anti-Christian views, the not so secret “euthanasia” program that targeted the mentally and physically disabled, or its persecution of dissidents and Jews. Others, like prominent resistance figure General Ludwig Beck, had initially supported Hitler for his repudiation of the Versailles diktat until they became disillusioned with him because his aggressive foreign policy was dangerous to Germany or because of his regime’s increasing totalitarianism. Another element was added by the Soviets attempting to organize communist resistance cells, though most were unsuccessful thanks to the effectivity of the Gestapo in uprooting them and lack of sympathy from the deeply conservative, nationalist officers at the heart of the conspiracy against the Führer.

This war against Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union was a result of Hitler overplaying his hand. At best his recklessness would end with Germany’s nose bloodied and leave the country in no position to act because of its damaged army and due to the enormous financial and economic strain the country was under. The massive remilitarization would have to be put on hold to get the government’s finances back in order and organize a less one-sided economy. That wasn’t something Hitler would do anyway, necessitating another war to add the economic riches of another small country to Germany’s own. In the worst case scenario France and Britain would join the war, leading to a two-front war that would result in utter defeat.

The fragmented nature of the German resistance made them indecisive, as reflected by their difficulty in agreeing on what form their resistance ought to take. Open resistance wasn’t possible – not so much because of the pervasive repressive apparatus of SS and Gestapo, as there were some examples of the regime backing down – but because of massive support for Hitler among the German people. Resisters would be seen as unpatriotic, especially in wartime, and so much so that even officers who detested Hitler were averse to involvement in “subversive” or “treasonous” acts. Besides that, officers struggled with their objections to Nazi crimes versus the personal oath of loyalty to Hitler they’d taken, a matter that was taken very seriously at the time.

Besides the Führer’s popularity, a second major point of discussion was whether to remove Hitler or not: some blamed the radicalism of the Nazis on Heinrich Himmler’s SS, believing Hitler could be moderated once these elements were gone. This necessitated eliminating Himmler and purging the country of the SS (not an easy task, given the SS numbered more than 200.000 men in 1938). A majority felt that a regime so dominated by one man could only be overthrown by removing that man. The next question was whether to assassinate Hitler or arrest him, another tough subject. There were devout Christians opposed to assassination based on the commandment “thou shalt not kill” and officers who felt it was dishonourable, both arguing to arrest him, which others opposed as his supporters could spring him from prison. This could lead to civil war between pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi elements.

Finally, there were differences of opinion on Germany’s political future. Liberal oppositionists wanted to restore a system of parliamentary democracy as had existed during the Weimar years. Some felt that removing Hitler and replacing him with a perceived moderate Nazi like Goering, who seemed to be a traditional “Wilhelmine” imperialist, was enough. Most officers and civil servants in the resistance, many of whom were conservatives and nationalists that had initially supported Hitler’s policies, supported either a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty or some kind of non-Nazi authoritarian regime.

The branch of the resistance centred on military officers – particularly around Abwehr military intelligence officer Colonel Hans Oster, protected by his boss Admiral Wilhelm Canaris – forced the matter by putting a bomb on Hitler’s plane on Monday October 10th. It didn’t explode and it wasn’t discovered either, but initially the plotters couldn’t know this, and they sighed in relief when they learned the ineffectual bomb had been removed by a fellow conspirator. The military intelligence branch of the resistance was undeterred and took charge, deciding they would simply mount a new assassination attempt. The risk of a countercoup or possibly even civil war was too great to leave Hitler alive during and after a coup d’état, which a majority agreed to when the matter was put up to a vote.

They would have to modify their plans though: the time to storm the Reich Chancellery, kill Hitler and take control of the government had come and gone as the Führer was now tightly holed up at the Berghof, where devout SS men protected him, his inner circle and his precious mistress Eva Braun. The Berghof and the Alpine chalets of the Führer’s cronies had become a sealed off secondary capital guarded by thousands of men, providing it with nigh impenetrable security. The conspirators had to be ready to act the moment Hitler left his secure bubble, which would likely only be for a short time and would therefore require improvisation.

In the meantime, Germany’s war effort continued. When, after the bombing of Prague, Czechoslovakia didn’t surrender, Hitler and his commanders had to decide whether to besiege the city or conquer it in costly urban combat as the frontline ran through the city’s outskirts. Given the valiant resistance the Czechoslovaks mounted, a house to house battle was deemed much too costly and Wehrmacht divisions surrounded the city instead. Artillery and aerial bombs would continue to pound the city while the bulk of the Wehrmacht moved eastward. Czechoslovakian forces were in full retreat, but established a new stabile frontline running from Ostrava, 30 km west of Zlín to Bratislava in mid-October.

Soviet reinforcements were underway. three Soviet infantry brigades had so far been assembled and given the critical situation they were sent to the front after Prague was surrounded. Four VVS fighter squadrons, two dive bomber squadrons equipped with Petlyakov Pe-2s and two bomber squadrons with Tu-2 medium bombers had also arrived. The build-up had been slow as everything had to come in by transport aircraft, but that changed the day after the bombing of Prague when the shocked government in Bucharest granted the Soviets permission to use supply corridors in their territory controlled by the Romanian Army. The rate at which Soviet units arrived seriously increased, but it was still difficult: there weren’t nearly enough trucks, which meant that Red Army troops marched to their destination on foot while supplies were delivered by horse drawn carts.

The Red Army was about as fast and efficient as a 1914 military during the early phase of their involvement in Czechoslovakia. Stalin tried to increase efficiency by forming a State War Committee that was granted full executive power by the politburo when it concerned decisions pertaining to the war. Its powers were so broadly and vaguely defined that this group of six effectively ruled the entire country. Stalin was its chairman and the other members were Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Vyacheslav Molotov, People’s Commissar for Defence Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, People’s Commissar for the Navy Mikhail Frinovsky, People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry Lazar Kaganovich, and Deputy Head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria (a clear sign Beria’s boss Yezhov was on his way out).

The State War Committee issued the “War Economy Order”, which prioritized the production of weapons, ammunitions, aircraft, trucks and locomotives while supporting sectors like steel industry, coal production and the oil fields and refineries went into overdrive. All nonessential production was minimized and many factories in these sectors were repurposed to produce war goods. In the short term this wouldn’t suffice, so the decision was made to pool 90% of all trucks in the Red Army to support this operation, drastically improving the logistical situation and the mobility of Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia. Soviet strength in Central Europe seriously increased.

This, however, meant that in the short term the Soviet Union could afford nothing but a strictly defensive posture on its other borders as there were no logistical means left to support even a limited offensive. Fortunately the only source of trouble was Japan, and they weren’t going to try anything soon after the Soviet success in the Battle of Lake Khasan. They weren’t aware of the USSR’s relative weakness. The truth was that the purges had left the top of the Red Army gutted, with the replacements of the tens of thousands of purged officers often being appointees selected for their political loyalty rather than their competence. The Red Army was a bulky, cumbersome force run by Stalin’s cronies, but fortunately there were a few talented officers still left: one of them was Kirill Meretskov, one of the few officers with combat experience, as he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. He commanded the Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia.

After the Wehrmacht had completed its encirclement of Prague on October 12th, one day after the bombing of the city, the German advance to the east rapidly continued and they would soon face the Bolsheviks directly. The first battle in which German and Soviet forces fought was the Battle of Zlín that took place between October 13th and 15th 1938. Inspired by the classical Battle of Cannae, German commanders utilized a double envelopment tactic to cut off a Czechoslovak-Soviet salient that protruded 50 kilometres westward from Zlín and was 25 km wide at its widest point. Soviet units were among those guarding the flanks and their BT-7 tanks engaged the German Panzer IIs, performing well. The 13.9 tonne BT-7s had a 45 mm gun and armour up to 40 mm while the 8.9 tonne Panzer II had a 20 mm gun and armour up to 15 mm. The Soviet tank outperformed the German one in firepower and armour, but the Soviets experienced the effectiveness of German combined arms (called “blitzkrieg”) in which armour, infantry and air power cooperated and communicated directly. In the air, Soviet fighter pilots courageously fought and experienced the Luftwaffe’s massive superiority in training and aircraft, learning some necessary lessons the hard way. Available Soviet fighters didn’t do well against Bf-109s, apart from some lucky cases.

Though Soviet tanks were better pound for pound, German blitzkrieg tactics inflicted heavy losses and in response the Red Army would adopt Deep Operations doctrine in the future (though not rehabilitating its originator Tukhachevsky). Though tactically it was a German success as they reduced the size of the salient which led to the decision to abandon it to shorten the front, the battle was strategically inconclusive as losses were about equal on both sides and the Czechoslovaks hadn’t been decisively beaten. German commanders learnt their tanks weren’t the best. Long story short, both sides learned from this confrontation.

Germany’s situation became all the more pressing as Britain and France had decided to declare war on October 15th, after taking two painful weeks to decide on their next course of action in response to naked German aggression and Soviet intervention. Moscow had gained enormous prestige as the leader of the anti-fascist struggle, which necessitated Anglo-French action to preserve their geopolitical relevance as the leaders of the free world (a status they had by default as America had again assumed an isolationist course after the Great War). Besides that, the bombing of Prague had shocked them out of their complacency concerning Hitler’s true nature and they had already condemned the act in strong wordings. They followed up with an ultimatum demanding that Germany would agree to an armistice, evacuation of its forces to the pre-war border and a resumption of diplomatic negotiations about the status of the Sudeten Germans. Hitler was given 72 hours to reply, after which France would feel “compelled to live up to its obligation to come to the defence of Czechoslovakia, in turn activating the alliance between Britain and France.” Needless to say the Führer didn’t seriously believe they would go through with this, but on Saturday morning October 15th declarations of war were issued in London and Paris after Berlin had let the ultimatum expire the previous day.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Time for the French to show they're not cheese eating surrender monkeys!

Chapter V: Stalemate in Czechoslovakia and the Saar Offensive, 15 October-November 8 1938.​

When the news about the declarations of war from Great Britain and France reached him after he got out of bed at ten o’clock that morning, his face turned ashen and grey. That didn’t last long at all and by noon he was having lunch with cake and tea as per his regular routine and boldly declaring to his staff as well his guests that day – Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and Ribbentrop – and anyone else who would listen that the British and French didn’t have the stomach for war. He boasted that Czechoslovakia was on the brink of defeat and said that the Battle of Zlín against the Soviets was a clear German victory in his opinion. Once “this miscreant of Versailles”, as Hitler called Czechoslovakia that day, had been dealt with he would transfer the bulk of his army west to defeat the cowardly French and British before they were full well ready. If necessary, Paris and London would get the same treatment Prague got. He was also very optimistic about renegotiating the German-Polish borders and rallying Germany’s Anti-Comintern Pact allies, Italy and Japan, to deal with the USSR.

In the afternoon he had a four hour conference with the chief officers of the Wehrmacht and his commander of the Luftwaffe to discuss the course of the war. The meeting included the same four confidants he’d spoken to five days earlier at the Bendlerblock in Berlin: Von Brauchitsch, Keitel, Halder and Goering. These were the same people who had agreed with Hitler that Prague should be bombed. Also in attendance to represent the Wehrmacht were Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt, who was the overall commander of operations in Czechoslovakia, as well as his chief of staff General Erich von Manstein and his chief of operations Colonel Günther Blumentritt. Admiral Erich Raeder attended this summit to represent the Kriegsmarine. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop attended as well given the complicated international situation.

The October 15th military conference at the Berghof was dominated by Hitler from the get-go. In a longwinded monologue he insisted on an offensive that would squash Czechoslovakia once and for all, so he could turn the war around in Germany’s favour again. If the Czechoslovak Front was dealt with, the Soviets would be effectively neutralized for lack of borders with Germany. He was certain that Poland would never permit Soviet forces on its soil, leaving only Britain and France to deal with. He estimated they’d need a month at least to mobilize, giving the Wehrmacht a small window of opportunity. Once that was settled, he was certain Warsaw could be convinced to join Germany in an anti-communist crusade. He also wanted to know what the Kriegsmarine’s plans to deal with the Royal Navy were.

Rundstedt was pessimistic, but his chief of staff Manstein had a daring proposal inspired by the Schlieffen Plan, except that it was flipped upside down: the right wing would be in the south and the left in the north. His plan was to feign an attack on the city of Ostrava, known as the “steel heart” of Czechoslovakia due to its status as a coal-mining and metallurgic centre. The main blow would be at Bratislava, where the right wing had to break through the enemy frontline and then attack them in the rear, using the relatively flat terrain around the city (most of Slovakia was very mountainous). To maximize the number of troops, the light screening force on the French-German border would have to be reduced. Though Rundstedt remained sceptical, Hitler was enthusiastic and ordered the implementation of what became known as Operation Königgrätz.

He was less pleased with Admiral Raeder’s appraisal of the naval situation. The surface fleet could only field the battleship Gneisenau, three Deutschland-class pocket battleships, three obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, twelve torpedo boats, 45 U-boats and dozens of auxiliary vessels. Gneisenau’s sister ship Scharnhorst was scheduled to be commissioned in January, though that could be brought forward by a few weeks to December if a few corners were cut. The two big battleships that he had high expectations of, the Bismarck-class, were still roughly two years away and the planned Graf Zeppelin-class aircraft carriers would take even longer. Even if they all magically became available sooner, an invasion of Britain was still out of the question; he assessed the fleet wouldn’t be ready for that until 1948. The Royal Navy had twelve battleships, three battlecruisers and four aircraft carriers and was superior in every other conceivable category of ships. A tactic of commerce raiding was possible, but in his assessment Raeder concluded the Kriegsmarine was better off remaining a “fleet in being”. Hitler was disappointed and resolved to bring Britain to its knees through “economic means” and envisioned a Napoleonic “Continental System.” None of the attendants reminded him that that hadn’t worked for Napoleon either, perhaps to avoid another of the longwinded boring monologues the Führer had a penchant for. The Kriegsmarine did have one success though: on November 5th U-26 sneaked into Scapa Flow and sunk battleship HMS Royal Oak and the HMS Iron Duke, an older battleship used as a training vessel.

In early evening, after the military conference was over, Hitler and Ribbentrop had dinner with Italian ambassador Bernardo Attolico on the Berghof to ask him about Italy’s military preparations and when Il Duce was planning to join the war. Ambassador Attolico explained that mobilization was underway, but listed shortages in ammunitions and logistical bottlenecks that slowed the process and explained war stockpiling of strategic resources like oil, coal and steel hadn’t yet begun. Moreover, Italy was still heavily involved in the Spanish Civil War, supporting Franco’s forces. While all these things were true, mobilization was going slow even by Italian standards. Hitler was disappointed to learn the Regio Esercito might be able to join the Wehrmacht in late November, early December. He’d hoped for Italian support in the upcoming autumn offensive intended to crush Czechoslovakia. Attolico kept this to himself, but the truth was that Mussolini had no intention of going to go to war against France and Britain unless there was a decisive German victory, knowing Italy was too weak to stand up to them. He wanted to wait and see which side would get the upper hand and then try to exploit the situation.

On October 21st, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Königgrätz, their massive offensive to decisively defeat Czechoslovakia that involved well over one third of a million troops. It started with a brief artillery and aerial bombardment against the defences near Ostrava, followed by a two-pronged assault with a force totalling two army corps that was serious enough to trick Czechoslovak military leaders into thinking the Germans intended to capture the “steel heart.” Their real goal was more ambitious. After reconnaissance flights and intelligence reports confirmed the Czechoslovaks were falling for it, a force of 250.000 men unleashed their assault southward toward Bratislava and advanced rapidly over the relatively flat terrain, reaching the city’s outskirts in 24 hours. Fortunately, the size of Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia had significantly increased and the German offensive grinded to a halt thanks to their intervention. German attempts to circumvent the city were blocked by the Red Army as well. Manstein’s idea had failed, not because it was tactically unsound but because Germany’s military build-up simply wasn’t large enough. In skirmishes, German commanders proved their tactical superiority over their Soviet counterparts and inflicted 50-75% more casualties than they incurred, but this wasn’t enough to bridge the gap. Perhaps if Italian forces had been available to relieve German occupation forces in Bohemia and Moravia, then the Germans would’ve had enough manpower, but we’ll never know for sure.

An Allied offensive was being prepared in the West to relieve the Czechoslovaks. The Czechoslovak high command had hoped to coordinate with the British and the French as the German offensive left them in a tight spot, but the French weren’t quick enough. France’s mobilization wasn’t fully completed yet, but the decision was made to launch an offensive as soon as possible, in part because the Czechoslovak ambassador kept begging for it. Unfortunately, the outdated mobilization system limited the French Army’s ability to swiftly deploy its forces on the field. Furthermore, The French command still believed in the tactics of the Great War, which relied heavily on stationary artillery, even though this took time to transport and deploy. Moreover, France’s commander General Maurice Gamelin, the Chief of the Army Staff, was cautious. He, for example, forbade bombing raids on key German industrial cities as he feared reprisals against French cities, not knowing 95% of the Luftwaffe was deployed in Czechoslovakia. The advance he’d planned was also limited as he and his officers seriously overestimated German strength.

On Sunday October 30th, nearly two weeks after their declaration of war and almost a month after the German invasion had begun, the French finally launched their offensive into the Saarland region. No less than 25 French divisions of the Second Army Group slowly advanced on a 32 kilometre wide front, taking twelve towns and villages and occupying most of the Warndt Forest, an unopposed advance of about eight kilometres into German territory in three days. He almost appeared reluctant, but Gamelin allowed the advance to continue and French forces that included the French 32nd Infantry Regiment took the city of Saarbrücken, encountering only some light resistance and reaching the Siegfried Line in the process. Gamelin ordered his forces to halt and maintain a defensive posture until further notice. They’d have to wait until heavy artillery batteries arrived to deal with German fortifications, which French command erroneously believed to be fully manned and very tough nuts to crack.

Colonel Charles de Gaulle, who commanded the 507th Tank Regiment, ignored the order to stop at the Siegfried Line as he saw an opportunity and decided to take it. Reconnaissance flights and probing advances seemed to confirm that a stretch of the enemy’s defensive line was completely unmanned and was there for the taking. De Gaulle ordered his Char D2 medium tanks and Renault R35 light tanks to charge forward through a fairly lightly forested area, firing off some 47 mm and 37 mm shells against German bunkers until they noticed no-one was firing back. By November 3rd, De Gaulle had punched a hole in the Siegfried Line with ease, leading him to conclude the line was severely undermanned (which was correct, as the German screening force had been reduced from ten divisions to only five, only one of which was stationed in the Saarland).

Gamelin had considered reprimanding De Gaulle, but decided not to when more frontline commanders began asking permission to probe the Siegfried Line more aggressively, hoping to emulate De Gaulle’s success. French command started to consider that enemy defences weren’t as strong as originally thought and allowed the advance to continue, upon which they discovered that Siegfried Line was almost undefended because their troops could simply take it. After the French had roughly calculated the real amount of enemy troops they had to be facing, they knew the original assumptions their fighting orders were based on were way off. There was no need to be careful since with a 25:1 numerical advantage they couldn’t lose even if they’d been taking orders from a complete imbecile.

It took no genius to see the French could occupy the Saarland at will and therefore Gamelin – who may not have been a brilliant commander, but who was more than competent enough to recognize his advantage over the enemy – ordered his forces to do exactly that, a task they managed to complete by November 7th. De Gaulle’s tank regiment charged forward, easily squashing what little resistance it encountered. French propaganda latched on to this dashing and fearless commander and by the end of the Saar Offensive he was promoted to Brigadier General. He was the first French commander to demonstrate the capabilities of the tank weapon and it helped that he became the face of the this victory because it meant he was listened to. It would take years, however, before the French Army completely adopted his views and several more years before the reforms were done. For now the renewed confidence gained by victory was enough for the French Army to continue. There was no way to win for the Germans anymore.

 

[Onkel Willie]

The end of the Sudeten War (but not of the TL).

Chapter VI: Regime Change and the Peace of Moscow, November 1938-May 1939.​

Meanwhile, Hitler had told his confidants he still intended to hold his annual commemorative speech in the honour of the “martyrs” of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. The speech would be held in the evening of Tuesday November 8th, the day before the anniversary of the coup, and on the day itself he was to review a military parade. Hitler had made his decision to hold his speech and see the military parade in Munich in November because he knew his Führer cult depended on him being visible. For weeks Hitler had only made a few radio addresses to the German people, but he wanted to be seen on cinema newsreels and in the flesh. The event would therefore be filmed to be shown in newsreels.

The plans of the German Resistance to assassinate Hitler now became desperately urgent, as the conservative-nationalist officers and politicians leading it feared that there’d be a second Versailles if there was a decisive Allied victory. Hitler’s decision to come to Munich seemed to provide them with an opportunity as he would be out in the open for the first time since the war had begun. He’d be leaving the security of the Obersalzberg for the first time since October 10th, after leading the war from “his mountain” for over four weeks.

The Führer would be travelling to Munich using the Führer’s special train (Führersonderzug), which included two locomotives, a flak wagon with two quadruple 20 mm flak guns, two baggage cars, a private car for Hitler, a command car, a car for Hitler’s security detail, two dining cars, two guest cars, a bathing car, a press car and two sleeping cars for personnel. The plan was to detonate a bomb in the train, or alternatively to derail it with a bomb. Eventually the choice was made to detonate it inside the train, as soldiers and SS would be patrolling the entire length of track toward Munich, making it likely that a bomb on the rails would be seen.

An infiltrator loyal to the plotters planted the bomb on the train, but as Hitler often did he changed his travel plans at the last minute by deciding to go by car one day before. This didn’t throw off the plotters as they had considered alternatives in anticipation of this event. His car and those of other Nazi big wigs would be at the heart of a heavily armed motorcade. Attacking it with gunfire was a risky way to do it as a moving target was hard to hit, and because hundreds of SS men would return fire. An ambush was considered, but that would involve such a large amount of men that the secret might be leaked and therefore this proposal was rejected. They only had one bomb and the materials for a second weren’t at hand, so the plan was changed to place this bomb below the podium in the Beer Hall where Hitler would be speaking. The timer was set so Hitler would be about half an hour into the speech.

The reunion started at 08:30 PM and Hitler was invited onto the podium, starting his speech to the 3.000-strong audience of party faithful at 8:37 PM. Sitting behind him and listening in reverence were henchmen that included Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley. Crucially absent were Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and his right-hand man and Gestapo director Reinhard Heydrich. They, perhaps ironically, remained in Berlin to discuss the increase in dissent, defeatist comments, opposition to measures to support the war, and the decrease in Hitler’s popularity that resulted in “displays of disrespect and lack of loyalty to the Führer, the party and the Reich.” They agreed on the “Night-and-Fog” order, which said that “persons endangering German security” would be made to disappear. The absence of Himmler and Heydrich fortunately served the plans of the plotters.

At 09:05 PM the bomb went off directly below Hitler, killing him instantly and most of the people on the podium. Ten people were killed instantly by the bomb and 75 were injured. Only Goering was lucky enough to survive, though the chronic pain resulting from the ordeal worsened his morphine addiction. He was arrested and kept under house arrest for months until the war was over and he subsequently lived off the royalties of his memoirs until he died of a heart attack in 1953 in a mansion near his birthplace in Bavaria. He remained involved in politics as a Reichstag member of the National Social Union (NSU), the successor party to the NSDAP. Controversially, his birth city Rosenheim named a street after him upon his death (a decision that infuriated the Jewish community, which was relatively large when compared to other Bavarian cities). Himmler and Heydrich were killed as soldiers entered their offices guns blazing. Their bullet ridden corpses ended up in anonymous graves, only to be found and identified decades later.

Within twenty minutes of the bomb going off and news that it’d killed Hitler, officers loyal to the conspiracy used the confusion to execute the planned coup d’état in Berlin (they figured that if they controlled Berlin, the rest of the country would fall in line). Soldiers of the Reserve Army were ordered to seize control of the chancellery and all ministries, after which they totally cordoned off the seat of power in Berlin and put the rest of the city on lockdown. A nationwide radio broadcast was made that started as follows: “The Führer Adolf Hitler has been assassinated. An unscrupulous clique of party leaders alien to the front has attempted, under the exploitation of this situation, to betray the hard-struggling front and to seize power for their own selfish purposes.” The radio broadcast went on to explain the SS had tried to stage a coup, which the Wehrmacht had put down. After that, the broadcast said the Wehrmacht had taken over executive power in response to the military emergency. There were some pockets of resistance led by SS and SA units, Gestapo field offices and a handful of Wehrmacht units, but the story of an SS coup that was put down by a countercoup was largely accepted.

Within 48 hours the plotters had seized control of Germany and began installing a new conservative-nationalist and authoritarian, but decidedly non-Nazi, government. Former Chief of Staff of the OKH General Ludwig Beck assumed the chancellorship. Beck appointed the deeply religious Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, once a member of the ultraconservative and monarchist DNVP, as Vice Chancellor. Among the ministers in the cabinet were also the well-known diplomat Count Ulrich von Hassel as Foreign Minister, General Hoepner as Minister of War, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel as Minister of Defence and Hjalmar Schacht, who was viewed as fairly untainted, was asked to act as Minister of Economics as well as Finance (the two ministries would later be merged). The office of President was left unoccupied on purpose as the conservative junta had already resolved to restore the monarchy. They planned to pass over ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II because he was too unpopular, Crown Prince Wilhelm because he’d flirted with the Nazis too much, and Prince Wilhelm of Prussia who had renounced his succession rights to wed. Prince Louis Ferdinand was asked instead and he accepted after his father and grandfather had given their blessing, knowing a chance to restore the monarchy might not come a second time. He became Emperor Louis I. The first thing this new government did on Friday November 11th was to unilaterally declare a ceasefire and announce a phased withdrawal from Czechoslovakia.

With French forces swelling to forty divisions and fanning out into the Rhineland, it was paramount that the war would be ended and that peace negotiations would be initiated immediately. The story the regime of Prussian generals was planning on selling was that Germany and its people hadn’t wanted war, but that the racist madman Hitler had dragged them into it to live up to his own deluded ideas of grandiosity and destiny. They would adopt a reconciliatory tone and express a desire to form an alliance between London, Paris, Berlin and Rome as a means to insure international security. With due respect for the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties and the Kellog-Briand Pact, such a pact of four powers would give the League of Nations teeth (though with the implied but not explicitly stated side effect that smaller nations would have less of a voice in great power politics).

If the Anglo-French peace proposals were too stringent, the Germans would point out the communist threat that had nestled in the heart of Europe: 350.000 men of Stalin’s Red Army were assembling in the country. Punitive war indemnities would be millstone on the neck of the German economy, leading to a debt crisis as Germany would have to default given the massive debt spending under the Nazi regime to rearm. This could in turn cause a severe economic crisis that could lead to support for a communist revolution in Germany, aided by the Soviets through Czechoslovakia. If this didn’t do the trick, a virtual demilitarization of Germany like in 1919 would certainly do the trick: using Czechoslovakia as a springboard, the Soviets could invade Germany and with a Versailles sized army of 100.000 men it wouldn’t be able to defend itself with Soviets on the Rhine as an end result, unless Germany got an Anglo-French guarantee for its security against the Soviets. The fact that the Red Army advanced to Prague and the German border as the Germans withdrew from the country indicated Stalin wasn’t planning on leaving Central Europe.

After the ceasefire had been declared and the German withdrawal from Czechoslovakia had begun, France and Britain agreed to an armistice on November 14th. The Soviet Union followed the next day as Stalin had no intention of making this a long, drawn out conflict. If anything, this war had shown him the debilitating effect the purges had had on the Red Army and that modernization was absolutely necessary, never mind the economic burden it had been. He did, however, insist the negotiations would take place in Moscow and, given Stalin’s prestige as the first to fight fascism, they couldn’t deny him this honour. Following the Soviet Union’s lead, Czechoslovakia agreed to an armistice too.

Diplomatic delegations from Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain and the Soviet Union met in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. The German delegation led by Foreign Minister Ulrich von Hassel emphasized the culpability of Hitler and the Nazis as well as Germany’s innocence. They also directly offered to supply the construction materials to rebuild Prague to its original state, to the way it was before Hitler’s order to bomb it, in an attempt to soak Czechoslovakia off of the USSR. Counting on the likelihood that the Czechoslovaks would be unresponsive to German attempts to curry favour, Von Hassel emphasized the “Red Threat” as planned in informal meetings with French and British diplomats and some German diplomats made some off-hand remarks that it was no coincidence that a Jew like Litvinov headed the Soviet delegation.

Stalin was well aware of Germany’s shenanigans in these backroom dealings as all the rooms were bugged by the NKVD, but there wasn’t much he or NKVD chief Beria could do about it (Yezhov had been removed at this point). Litvinov headed the Soviet delegation and Soviet proposals included war reparations to Czechoslovakia, restricting the size of the Wehrmacht to 300.000 men, forbidding the Kriegsmarine from possessing any capital ships other than the ones currently in service, returning Germany to its 1937 pre-Anschluss borders and a continued collective security agreement between the USSR, France and Britain to contain the fascist powers (in Soviet eyes the regime change in Berlin was a cosmetic change that still left a fascistic regime in power). Britain and France were initially in a punitive mood because their own lackadaisical attitude towards Germany concerning violations of Versailles had led to this war, and wanted to prevent Germany coming back for round three.

German predictions, however, seemed to come true and this gradually led to the British and French changing their minds. For example, the continued large presence of the Red Army in Czechoslovakia seemed to confirm their looming suspicions that the Soviets had an ulterior motive in wanting to keep Germany so weak, which Von Hassel had already told them was going to happen. Secondly, after cooler heads prevailed in Whitehall and the Elysée, they concluded that a four power arrangement with a sane German leadership that reaffirmed Locarno and Kellog-Briand might not be such a bad deal.

The 1933-’38 period under Hitler could be seen as an interruption of the process of Germany being reaccepted into the international community. Hitler was the anti-Stresemann and the combination of economic crisis and a lingering sense of national humiliation had propelled him into power. After their paradigm shift Britain and France concluded that Germany shouldn’t be made into a pariah again so there wouldn’t be a second Hitler, but were also reticent to immediately latch onto the German proposal for quadrilateral cooperation.

Besides their own suspicions, the British and the French were also pressured into opposing the Soviets by third parties. Czechoslovakia’s next door neighbour Poland, an important ally, was also worried about the Soviet presence there as they could now be attacked from two sides. This threat could be used by Moscow to pressure Warsaw into concessions it was unwilling to give under the threat of a two-pronged assault. Britain and France would be in no position to help Poland any more than they were able to intervene in Czechoslovakia, but a strong Germany would be. Neo-imperial Germany was seen as the lesser of two evils by the Poles and they wanted to befriend it rather than drive it into the arms of the Russian bear and wind up being partitioned again. What also helped was that Mussolini sent his son-in-law and Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano to Paris and London to argue in favour of Germany. The motive was that Soviet Balkan ambitions alarmed Rome.

The Treaty of Moscow that was concluded in May 1939 was a great disappointment to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. It would cause Czechoslovakia to shift its foreign policy focus to Moscow while the communist KSČ party grew in every subsequent election and by the mid-40s established a one party state. In the 1939 Czechoslovak parliamentary election the KSČ won 22.1%, making it the largest political party of the country in one blow. In terms of seats in parliament they more than doubled in size. The Sudeten German Party had been banned for collaboration with the Germans during the war, but the “German Autonomy Party” (Deutsche Autonomie-Partei, or DAP for short) replaced it, which was allowed because the ethnic Germans technically still had minority rights despite the enormous mistrust that existed towards them. Fearing for their own livelihood in Czechoslovakia, almost all Sudeten Germans voted for the DAP and it won 15.9% of the vote and became the second largest party in parliament. The social liberal and nationalist ČSNS, the social-democratic ČSSD, and the Christian-democratic ČSL with 13.8%, 12.3% and 9.5% of the vote respectively formed a centre-left coalition with the communists. Beneš stayed on as President as no-one contested his position, probably because his position was mostly ceremonial.

Czechoslovakia formally left the Little Entente, choosing the Soviets as their ally over France due to the weak French performance. They concluded France would’ve done nothing if the Soviets hadn’t acted, allowing the Germans to take the Sudetenland by force. If this had happened, Czechoslovakia might not have resisted at all as its leaders knew a drawn out conflict was unwinnable for them. Yugoslavia and Romania, the remaining two members of the Little Entente, were highly sceptical as well after witnessing how France had taken two painful weeks to declare war on in support of its supposed ally. The Little Entente was subsequently disbanded.

The treaty imposed no military restrictions on Germany (other than the pre-existing Anglo-German Naval Agreement) and no war reparations were imposed either, except for Germany paying for Czechoslovakia’s war damage. Besides the pro forma renunciation of territorial claims to the Sudetenland region, Germany reaffirmed its commitment to the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties and the Kellog-Briand Pact. France would be allowed a screening force in the Rhineland that would be withdrawn in phases over five years. To a country that had just been thoroughly thrashed like Czechoslovakia this was a blow to the face. To them it hardly mattered that there’d been a regime change. The new regime’s attempts to pin it all on a madman seemed like a weak attempt to exculpate a country that until very recently had worshipped that same madman. Hitler hadn’t been alone in his ambitions. And yet it worked.

After an interregnum of 21 years, the German Empire had risen from its ashes and unlike the Weimar Republic its fate didn’t appear star-crossed at its rebirth. Instead Imperial Germany could keep the gains of the Nazis and, with some reserve, normal diplomatic relations were resumed between Germany on one hand and Britain and France on the other. The ice cold tyrant of the East interpreted this in his typically paranoid way, seeing this as the beginning of a European coalition against the Soviet Union. This was the last thing Stalin had wanted.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And now we continue with how the restoration of the monarchy plays out in practice.

Chapter VII: German Empire Reborn, 1939-1940.​

The new German Empire had to deal with the legacy of five years of National Socialism. This virulent ideology had turned the country into a totalitarian racist cult that had reduced an entire group of citizens (German Jews) to second rate citizens, sterilized people with mental or physical birth defects, threw people into concentration camps for having a dissenting opinion, indoctrinated millions, stifled freedom through its complete control of public life and the media, and had started a war the country could never have won. Had Hitler not been killed, no-one knows how the war would have progressed, but almost certainly it wouldn’t have ended as favourably as it had now.

Germany was free to maintain its military strength and could even keep Austria, but there were other decidedly domestic problems to be dealt with: what to do with the Nazi party, what of the regime’s victims, what of the wrongdoers, and what of those millions who had tacitly supported the regime? The young new Emperor, only 31 years old at the time, had his own pragmatic views on the matter, but would have to deal with the fact that even among anti-Nazi conservatives there were plenty of people who didn’t like Jews, believed in the value of eugenics and racial hygiene, and had little sympathy for or understanding of democracy. Louis was not going to support the authoritarian, militaristic and nationalist government they envisioned unconditionally.

Emperor Louis I was no traditional Prussian monarch as he hadn’t had a military career. During his extensive travels he had settled in Detroit for a while where he befriended car producer Henry Ford and became acquainted with then future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. He’d picked up an interest in engineering, particularly in the field of aviation, though Hitler hadn’t allowed him any involvement in German military activities upon his return to Germany in 1933 after his older brother’s renunciation of the defunct throne to marry a commoner. He had no sympathy for the Nazis at all, but was also able to look at the Prussian aristocratic military junta that had replaced them as an outsider because he’d seen an actually functioning democracy in the United States as opposed to the continually troubled Weimar Republic.

The young Kaiser was able to gain popularity quickly as the abrupt end of the Nazi regime left people in search of a new messiah, and his success in playing the masses gave him influence in the ruling junta as well. Particularly influential was his speech broadcast live on radio during his formal coronation ceremony in February 1939, later also shown in cinema newsreels. He mentioned the occult influences of the Nazi regime and thanked God for still guiding the country through the brief and uncalled for war against Czechoslovakia launched by the misguided Hitler, signalling that most Germans fortunately were still good Christians. During the same address he also announced a conciliatory tone to those who’d actively participated in the Nazi regime, yet also denounced its cult of personality and racial ideology as idolatrous and misguided. Crimes committed in the name of the Nazi regime, however, would be persecuted to the letter of the law. He concluded by saying that all Germans should have a vote in how their country was run, but without the chaos of the Weimar years: a middle ground between the Weimar Republic and the pre-1914 Empire, while the short-lived Third Reich was relegated to the ash heap of history.

The young Emperor and a number of German as well as foreign experts on constitutional law began convening in January 1939 to draft a new constitution for the reborn German Empire, comparing the constitution of the Weimar Republic and the Second Reich and choosing elements from both as well as foreign examples that had merit. He envisaged a mixture of the old Wilhelmine system, Westminster style constitutional monarchy and the Weimar Republic.

The new regime was seen as a continuation of the German Empire that had ended in 1918, so it was never once referred to as a “Fourth Reich” since that would suggest continuity with Hitler’s regime. In terms of the liberties it granted German citizens and the duties it expected from them, the whole document differed very little from the Weimar constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, privacy of correspondence, the inviolability of the home, habeas corpus, free and secret elections, eligibility of all German citizens to public office, and equal rights to linguistic, religious, ethnic and racial minorities were all incorporated into it. In adopting this constitution and enforcing it, Germany would also directly restore the civil rights of its remaining Jews (i.e. those who hadn’t left the country yet) as discrimination against minorities on any grounds was explicitly forbidden. While that wouldn’t undo the last five years of oppression and the fact that plenty of Germans still entertained antisemitic opinions, life would become much easier for German Jews from now on. A separate decision was to declare the NSDAP and all its suborganizations to be criminal organizations, resulting in the burning of millions of party membership cards in 1939 and 1940.

By far the most significant changes were made in the political system. All men and women from the age of 18 would be able to vote for 500 representatives of the Reichstag in elections governed by the principles of proportional representation. Elections would be held once every four years. All men and women were eligible for office from the age of 25. The constitution said nothing about whether Germany’s constituent states should remain republics or become monarchies again, which resulted in several states restoring their own monarchies: chief among them was the still quite popular Bavarian royal house of Wittelsbach. Notable exception was Thuringia, which had been formed in 1920 out of the Ernestine Thuringian duchies. The elected parliaments of these states, rather than their returned monarchs, held legislative power just like the Reichstag did over all of Germany.

The various state parliaments would send representatives to the Bundesrat, the upper house of Germany’s parliament. Conservatives were not pleased with the restoration of the Weimar era Reichstag and even less that a once conservative bulwark, the Bundesrat, would now also be elected indirectly by the masses because democratically elected state parliaments would now vote for which representative(s) to send. As in the original Bundesrat Prussia sent seventeen representatives, Bavaria sent six, Saxony four, Württemberg four, Baden three, Hesse three, Mecklenburg-Schwerin two, Brunswick two, seven smaller states got one vote each, and the state of Thuringia created in 1920 got seven representatives as seven states with one vote each had merged into it. One question was whether Austria should be seen as one constituent state, merged with Bavaria, or if each of its nine federal states should be seen as separate constituent states: ultimately the decision was made to treat Austria as one state with four representatives and make it an Archduchy, making Otto von Habsburg its Archduke. Merging it with Bavaria would’ve made Bavaria too powerful for Prussia’s taste, and turning it into nine individual states would probably have the same effect as they would likely follow the lead of Bavaria as the dominant south German state. This made for a total of 59 representatives and, to assuage the concerns of conservatives, the number was doubled to 118 by adding another 59 representatives directly appointed by the Emperor for life, most of which were aristocrats, military officers, religious leaders and industrial barons. Because Prussia often had dominated the Bundesrat because its Minister President was usually also Chancellor of Germany, the two offices were split: no-one could hold the offices of Minister President of Prussia and Chancellor of Germany at the same time.

As to the powers of the Emperor himself, these were greater than those of the British monarch but less than those of the German Emperor pre-1918: besides the power to refuse royal assent (which no British monarch had done since 1708) foreign and defence policies were still the German Emperor’s virtually exclusive prerogative, except in the event of a declaration of war when a vote by the Reichstag and the Bundesrat would have to take place. In one way the new German constitution was more democratic than the Westminster system as a refusal of royal assent could be overridden by a sixty percent majority in both houses of parliament (a change to the constitution had to be passed by the same majority). Furthermore, the Chancellor and cabinet members had a dual responsibility: a vote of no confidence by the Reichstag would obligate them to resign, but so would a demand from the Emperor to do so.

Finally, the old Article 48 of the Weimar constitution was reformed. In its original form Article 48 gave the President the power to take measures by decree – including the use of the armed forces and/or the suspension of civil liberties – to restore law and order in the event of a major threat to public safety or Reich security, something which could theoretically be overruled by the Reichstag. In its new form, Article 48 could only be activated if the Emperor, the Chancellor and the Minister of the Interior agreed to it, making them the triumvirate that would rule in the event of a domestic emergency. A corollary was added that the Ministers of Defence and War would be added if Germany was at war. Explicit regulations were added that regulated in what situation the activation of this clause could take place, furthermore detailing that it could only be used in defence of German democracy and never to abolish it.

After the new constitution was officially implemented on Thursday June 1st 1939, the first truly democratic elections in seven years since November 1932 were held three months later on Tuesday September 5th (the elections from 1933 to 1938 were controlled by the Nazis and decidedly undemocratic). The political parties banned by the Nazis proved resilient as they all reconstituted themselves in a matter of weeks and launched electoral campaigns, this time with fair and impartial access to media like radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines, tabloids, weeklies and so on. The social-democratic SPD won 31% of the vote, the Catholic Centre Party 11%, the left-liberal DDP 7%, the right-liberal FDP 8%, the communist KPD 9%, and the conservative nationalist DNVP 8%. With the NSDAP forbidden, a successor party called the National Social Union (NSU) was formed under Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer and former aviation minister Hermann Goering. The NSU got 17% of the popular vote, making it the largest opposition party. A centre left SPD-Centre Party-DDP-FDP coalition was formed that was called the Grand Democratic Coalition as it had 57% of the popular vote.

Social Democratic chairman Otto Wels became the new Chancellor of Germany and he continued to make use of the services of Minister of Finance and Economics Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht had opposed Hitler’s “economic miracle” as it was based on debt spending on massive rearmament, which he saw as disruptive to the economy. He was the only cabinet member of the Third Reich to serve in the new government, again to perform an economic miracle, albeit of a completely different kind: getting the government’s finances back in order, ideally without crushing austerity policies that would send the country into the throes of recession.

The Wels government decided to economize on military expansion. Firstly, the Wehrmacht’s size would be frozen at 600.000 men for at least two years. As to construction for the Kriegsmarine, it was decided to complete only what was already under construction and nothing else, abandoning Plan Z as such a world class navy was deemed both unnecessary and a luxury the country couldn’t afford. Besides that Schacht managed to renegotiate much of Germany’s debts so it would have much more time to pay, reducing the strain on government finances and lessening the need for austerity seriously. Germany still experienced a period of about eighteen months of economic stagnation, a full-blown recession was avoided.

Besides the economic troubles the new German Empire had to deal with, there were also a lot of political troubles. In the immediate aftermath there was a Nazi uprising analogous to the 1919 Spartacist Uprising, attempting to ignite a National Socialist revolution and claiming the war had been lost due to a second “stab in the back”, this time not by leftist elements but by aristocratic ones. In the first few weeks, the country was in a state of martial law as the Wehrmacht had to crush this uprising, which included SS units.

Besides that, the conservative elites were sceptical of the relatively liberal constitution Emperor Louis I had backed and disappointed that the pre-1914 system wasn’t restored. Louis would have to invest a lot of time and energy in convincing them that a constitutional monarchy presiding over parliamentary democracy was in their interest too. The scepticism came from the SPD as well since they were opposed to the restoration of the monarchy, fearing a return to the authoritarianism of the original Wilhelmine monarchy. The KPD, meanwhile, was downright hostile and Stalin wanted them to rise up, which caused conflicts in the party leadership between those in favour of this line and those afraid it would just end like it had in 1919. In the end they waited too long and the opportunity, if there had ever been one, passed. There was lots of distrust on both sides of the political spectrum and Stalin even hoped to fan the flames and ignite a civil war, but the young Emperor was adept enough to keep the peace: he promised the old elites their privileges were safe and the reconstituted Weimar parties that they would also have their say. That only left the attitudes instilled into the people by the Nazis to deal with and that would take much longer, as he was still regarded by many as well-intentioned when it came to the German cause, but unfortunately also reckless. Similarly many people, when asked, said Hitler had been right about the Jews, but that he’d just taken it a little too far. It would take years, decades even, for this to wear off. By the end of 1940, the reborn German Empire was tentatively looking forward to a bright future.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time!

Chapter VIII: The Four Power Fiasco and the Spanish Civil War, 1940-1942.​

In terms of international diplomacy, Germany was making very slow steps forward. It maintained its alliance with Italy, but also tried to realize a four power arrangement that would include Great Britain and France. After the short-lived Soviet scare subsided again, the British and the French seemed to develop some sort of fear of commitment because, while the radical Third Reich might be gone, it appeared the enemy they’d fought in 1914 had replaced it. There was this lingering suspiciousness and this subtle awe for Germany’s undiminished strength as the continent’s largest economy with the potential of building the best army in the world. German diplomats had the greatest difficulty in convincing many key figures in London and Paris that their country was now truly peaceful and desired political, economic and military European cooperation instead of reigniting old rivalries. They were worried they’d be reduced to junior partners in such an initiative in time given Germany’s economic strength.

Besides that, the Italians were completely passive in these talks, secretly concerning themselves more in how they could further their Balkan ambitions, encapsulate those of Stalin and somehow keep Britain and France from doing something about it. As an opportunist, Mussolini offered to assuage French and British fears by forming a trilateral alliance to isolate Germany in exchange for a free hand in the Balkans to “negotiate” more favourable borders with Yugoslavia and Greece. When word got out, the Germans were disenchanted and in turn toned down their efforts to form the dreamed four power pact.

The much discussed four power arrangement got mired in philosophical debates about what it should be, becoming a purposeless platform for idealist pacifists that wasn’t going anywhere fast. In June 1941 an utterly meaningless document was signed that can be summarized as “a commitment to peace, an intent to consult one another in major diplomatic initiatives, a military non-aggression pact and uniformization of tariff policies” as a historian has put it. The so-called Declaration of Potsdam was a grandiloquent agreement that didn’t really oblige the signatories to do anything other than not attack each other and assume common tariffs. It was little more than a vague commitment to a customs alignment.

The Declaration of Potsdam despite its emptiness ruffled feathers in Moscow as Stalin interpreted it differently as per his usual paranoid self, believing it to be the European component of a hostile anti-Soviet alliance. The Asian component, he believed, would consist of that other Anti-Comintern Pact: power Japan. He feared this two-pronged alliance would launch a war of aggression to finish what they’d started at the end of the Great War, when they had attempted to strangle the fledgling USSR in its cradle. The Red Army had to be improved and the industries needed for war (weapons production, ammunitions production, steel, oil and coal) required further expansion, which was already being worked on under the Third Five Year Plan. Very soon it became clear the war economy would be maintained.

Stavka, the Soviet General Staff, had produced a document with recommendations to improve the Red Army’s performance by the time the war in Czechoslovakia was over. In short it recommended completely overhauling the organization and the equipment to be able to carry out Deep Operations doctrine. Deep operations had two phases: the tactical deep battle, followed by the exploitation of tactical success, known as the conduct of deep battle operations. Deep battle envisaged the breaking of the enemy’s forward defences through combined arms assaults, which would be followed up by mobile operational reserves sent to exploit the strategic depth of an enemy front. The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult or impossible. Unlike most other doctrines, deep battle stressed combined arms cooperation at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Various recommendations on how to achieve that were listed, which included: breaking large, cumbersome tank divisions into smaller, more mobile divisions; equipping tanks with radios so they could coordinate with each other; forming a dedicated ground support arm in the air force with dive-bombers and fighters or fighter-bombers capable of ground attack; enabling them to answer to requests for precision “aerial artillery bombardment” by installing radios on all aircraft; improved artillery guidance; standardization of equipment; motorization of all branches of the army; and emphasizing that officers on the front ought to take independent action in the event of battlefield opportunities.

Stalin decided to seriously increase his support for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Despite signing the Non-Intervention Agreement, the USSR had been covertly supplying the Republicans in contravention of the League of Nations embargo imposed on the latter, becoming their only source of weapons. Now the Soviet Union not only started to do so openly, but also sent significant amounts of troops. Before 1938, the Soviets had 2.000-3.000 military advisors and a troop strength of only 500 men in the country. Stalin decided to create serious expeditionary force, which would of course be disguised as a “volunteer corps”. It would be the opposite of the Fascist Italian expeditionary force on the Nationalist side, which was deceptively called the “Corpo Truppe Volontarie” (Corps of Volunteer Troops). Stalin intended to deploy one infantry division, one armoured division, an artillery brigade, four fighter squadrons and two bomber squadrons. This amounted to roughly 40.000 men. This and the withdrawal of German support gave the Republican side a major morale boost.

The Soviet leader stated that “the Iberian Peninsula is the current frontline of the worldwide communist struggle. We may not let Spain fall to reactionary fascist forces, but must make it the knife pointed at the back of the capitalist vanguard.” This was a veiled reference toward his new move on the geopolitical chessboard, in which Spain was to become an important piece. At the very least a Red Spain could develop into a military distraction in the longer term after development under communist policies on the Soviet Stalinist model. In a purely military conflict it could attack France across the Pyrenees in the event of a joint Western attack on the USSR and function as a launch pad for Soviet efforts as well, particularly strategic aerial bombing. In the event that Spain was invaded during such a hypothetical war, it could become a thorn in the West’s side like it was to Napoleon through guerrilla warfare.

If the situation of armed peace between the Soviet Union and the West remained in place, Spain could serve to bolster the communists in France in particular. Until recently France was ruled by a Popular Front that received a boost in popularity when it made true on its anti-fascist credentials by fighting Germany in Czechoslovakia’s defence. In the wave of euphoria over the short and victorious war, critics who pointed out it had taken France two weeks to declare war and a month to actually fight were ignored. After the war disagreements resurfaced as many French leftists refused to help the Spanish Republicans as rightists threatened with another civil war in France itself. The socialist SFIO and the communist PCF were forced out of the Popular Front by early 1939, leaving only the Radical-Socialist Party (PRRRS) and smaller leftist parties as well as left-wing independents.

The 1940 French legislative elections held on Sunday April 28th and May 5th were not as successful as hoped, but gave the Soviets something to work with. The SFIO and the PCF increased their percentages of the popular vote by about 2.5 percent points each and combined they had 40.2% of the vote. The Radical-Socialists, contrary to their name, were actually only centre left and they were reduced to only 10% of the popular vote. They made the fateful decision to lend their support to a centre-right coalition, giving it a majority. This earned them the hatred and scorn of the SFIO and the PCF, who wound up in the opposition despite their electoral success. There was hope in Moscow of flipping France through electoral means, or through a civil war once a Red Spain had been established.

The “Soviet People’s Volunteer Army against Fascism in Spain” was the official name for Red Army troops fighting on the Republican side, but it’s more commonly known as the Soviet expeditionary force. It would be a testbed for the Red Army’s reforms. The Soviet expedition, for example, had tanks and planes that were all equipped with radios, which had required pooling all available radios suited to the task as there were so preciously few in the Red Army (the fourth Five Year Plan, to start in 1942, would emphasize electronics production for the military, though production was already beginning now). While Meretskov stayed in Moscow to advise and assist in the military reforms, another promising commander took his place in Spain: General Georgy Zhukov. Soviet reinforcements started to arrive in January 1939 (while the Moscow Peace Conference was still ongoing, with Stalin already not liking the way it was going) and breathed new life into the Republican cause.

Though they’d been forced to withdraw from the Ebro theatre, reinvigorated Republican forces with Soviet support stymied Franco’s offensive to take Catalonia. A vigorous new counteroffensive between February and April 1939 surprised Franco as he thought the Republicans were on the verge of collapse; the end result was that a tenuous connection was re-established between the two Republican-held portions of the country and that Barcelona was held. The truth is that the Republican side indeed was in a bad state, but the morale boost of Soviet intervention inspired them to fight back ferociously against the Nationalists. What also helped was that the Soviet economy had been on a war footing since October 1938 and had produced plenty of weapons, some of which were now sent to Spain: tanks, aircraft, bolt-action rifles, machine guns and so on.

The renewed morale of the Republicans – even though the Nationalists clearly had the upper hand and had backed them into a corner – gave the Soviets the time to deploy in strength in the early months of 1939. In March, Zhukov’s forces spearheaded an offensive intended to retake Tarragona and in doing so provided an early example of what Deep Operations doctrine could achieve if executed properly. After an artillery bombardment guided by aerial observers – who provided real-time data by radio to correct the aim of the gunners – 150 Soviet tanks rushed forward under air cover and punched multiple holes in the Nationalist frontline. As their front threatened to collapse with Soviet armour now operating in their rear, Nationalist commanders had no choice but to carry out a tactical withdrawal. A second Soviet bolstered offensive in the spring pushed the frontline to Teruel, an offensive by Franco to take Madrid was halted and a counteroffensive pushed the frontline away from the capital. The result was that by summer 1939 the frontline had moved away from the Republican provisional capital of Valencia over a distance that had Republican leaders sighing in relief.

Franco was worried about the fact that with Soviet help the Republicans had halted his advance and had consolidated their position. He asked Mussolini for help, to which Il Duce responded by increasing Italian strength to 80.000 men despite the serious cost attached to that. Rome asked Berlin to reconsider withdrawing from Spain, but Germany had to reduce spending and also didn’t want to be seen continuing a conflict Hitler had started. Stalin had no concerns on haemorrhaging men and materiel into the conflict and over the course of the summer matched the Italian build-up, exceeding it by increasing the Soviet presence to 100.000 men by early autumn.

In mid-September 1939, the tide in the Spanish Civil War began to turn decisively. Republican forces supported by the Soviets launched an offensive to take Ávila as the first step of a strategy to advance west to Portugal in order to cut the area under Franco’s control in two in a reversal of roles. The mountainous nature of the terrain and the autumn rain that reduced the roads to mud seriously slowed down the advance, but the Republicans stuck to their objectives. The mud prevented vehicles, including Soviet BT-7 and T-26 tanks, from reaching serious speed and the fighting devolved into a slogging match with Great War tactics. When the ground froze in December, the Republicans began making more headway by taking Ávila and reaching terrain that was less tough. Franco was no fool and sent the Italians to block an enemy advance toward Salamanca and subsequently the Portuguese border to prevent his territory from being cut in two. He held up his opponents for months, but no amount of competence could overcome the Soviet support pouring into the country forever. The campaign continued in 1940 with Salamanca falling to the Republican side on February 17th, marking the beginning of the end. The Nationalist held territories were cut in two shortly thereafter and in the spring the Republicans were mostly concerned with reducing the southern pocket, with the Soviets again practicing with Deep Operations quite successfully. In the north, Franco faced an insurgency in Basque Country that tied down part of his forces.

Eight months later, in October 1940, the south had been mopped up while in the north Nationalist forces had been reduced to a coastal sliver and were on the brink of defeat. A Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) flotilla evacuated Franco’s government and as many Nationalist units as possible while battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto provided suppressive fire with their main battery of nine 381 mm (15 inch) guns. The Nationalists arrived at the Balearic Islands and Franco chose the city of Palma as his provisional capital, which would turn out to become permanent. An armistice was signed with the Republicans controlling the mainland and the Nationalists the Balearics, but no peace treaty was signed. Italy occupied and de facto annexed Spanish Morocco, Rio de Oro, the Canary Islands and Spanish Guinea while Franco’s “Spanish State” in the Balearics became a puppet state and a naval base for the Regia Marina in the western Mediterranean Sea (Franco officially signed over the Canary Islands and the colonies to Italy for sorely needed cash in 1943). For lack of a serious navy, there was nothing Republican Spain and the Soviet Union could do about this. The Soviet Navy was second rate at best and the Spanish Navy third rate.

What Stalin certainly could and did influence was the kind of government that the Second Spanish Republic would be getting. The strong involvement of the Soviets in his long and hard fought victory of the Republicans after their war against Hitler further boosted the USSR’s prestige as the world’s leading anti-fascist power. Spanish socialists and communists gained electoral ground on the coattails of Soviet success. Their success was boosted by the decision to base the next election, to take place in June 1941, on the principle of proportional representation rather than the original system of constituencies with fixed numbers of representatives. The constitutionality of this is being disputed until this day.

The Soviets supported the Popular Front parties with everything they needed for their campaign, ranging from printing presses and ink to print pamphlets and posters to microphones and audio equipment for mass rallies. Soviet forces and leftist paramilitary forces also took control of radio stations across the country, allowing only left-wing parties airtime. The NKVD assisted in the intimidation and repression of political opponents and helped to organize severe electoral fraud by burning ballot papers for opposition parties. The socialist PSOE won 29.8% of the popular vote, which was enough for 141 out of 473 seats in the Cortes Generales (Spain’s parliament). Runner up was the communist PCE, which rose radically from about 2.5% of the popular vote to 25.4, enough for 120 seats. This was enough for the PSOE and the PCE to form a coalition with an absolute majority without the other Popular Front parties, but chose to maintain it for now.

In November 1941, five months after the elections, Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero was found dead, which was no coincidence since Stalin wanted to get rid of him as he represented the social democratic “right wing” that was willing to compromise with “bourgeois” parties (the cause of death was ruled homicide by poisoning). Julián Besteiro, who distrusted bourgeois parties more and clearly leaned toward the Marxist-Leninist left wing of the party, regained his position as President of the party and became the new Prime Minister. With NKVD “assistance” Spanish investigators discovered a “Trotskyite-Francoist Terrorist Centre” that was supposedly responsible for the assassination of Largo Caballero, intended to establish a bourgeois regime, and bring back Franco. A state of emergency was declared and a wave of arrests followed in which the social democratic “right wing” of the PSOE was purged as well as the entire Trotskyite POUM, other non-communist leftist or centre-left parties, participating centre-right parties and of course remnants of Francoism and the leadership of the Catholic Church in Spain.

The PSOE and the PCE merged into the “Partido de Unidad Socialista de España” or PUSE, which translates to Socialist Unity Party of Spain. In Stalinist elections in April 1942, the PUSE won 98% of the popular vote and what followed was the Red Terror: hundreds of thousands of arrests took place targeting everyone who was remotely critical of the government. A quarter of a million of them were executed while countless others were sent to forced labour camps to build factories and infrastructure, work in mines or build monuments for the “People’s Republic of Spain” in Socialist Realist style. The Catholic Church, a pillar of support for the Nationalists, was persecuted mercilessly, earning the regime the condemnation of Pope Pius XII. By the summer of 1942 a clone of the Soviet Union had been created on the southwestern flank of Europe.

 

[Onkel Willie]

After the failure to form a four power pact and the rise of a Red Spain, the West must somehow respond:

Chapter IX: The Anglo-German Alliance, 1942.​

What Soviet success in Spain did was to shock Britain in particular out of its sense of complacency as the lull in international tensions after the demise of Nazi Germany abruptly ended. France was initially willing to tentatively continue friendly relations with Moscow as there was a lingering distrust of Germany in Paris as well as the memory of the longstanding Franco-Russian Entente from 1892 to 1917 (although that was with Tsarist Russia rather than a bloody Red Tsar). Secondly, the political left was quite strong in France, particularly after the Spanish Republican victory, and the left was somewhat receptive to maintaining the 1935 “Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance” and upgrading it up to be more than a hollow diplomatic threat. There were, however, issues that prevented that: the more moderate SFIO was less convinced of a pro-Soviet foreign policy than the PCF given the traditional commitment to Britain and the rumours concerning Stalin’s reign of terror. After another coalition came apart, the SFIO and the Radical-Socialists as well as some moderate centre-right parties formed a new centrist one and it was pro-British. The PCF’s attempts to reignite the Anglo-French rivalry of past times failed to sway public opinion. Talks concerning a closer Franco-Soviet alliance were dead in the water now, much to the disappointment of Stalin: he’d banked on strengthening the French left and turning France pro-Soviet or, failing that, triggering a civil war in France. Both outcomes would sow dissent among the three major western powers, leading to infighting that Stalin intended to profit from, but it didn’t happen. This was a miscalculation.

From the point of view of the British, Russia re-emerged as a classical imperial rival as a pro-Soviet regime now threatened the Rock of Gibraltar, which controlled access to the Mediterranean Sea. The communist regime in Madrid proclaimed its desire to retake it and the Soviets said they’d support it, a statement the British had to take seriously given the continued Red Army presence in Spain. Keeping Gibraltar was paramount as the Mediterranean was the conduit to the Suez Canal and ultimately the crown jewel of the British Empire: India.

British political and military leaders in fact became increasingly concerned that this was but the beginning of a geopolitical scheme to achieve traditional Russian foreign policy goals: taking the Turkish Straits to obtain a warm ice-free port on the Mediterranean and challenge British control of it, contest British dominance over the Middle East, and capture a warm water port on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean. Besides concerns about traditional conflicting imperial ambitions, communist ideology was a second component that worried the British as it could infect the Indian elites with the “wrong ideas” about India’s place within the Empire (for example, the Secret Intelligence Service had picked up rumours concerning contacts between Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose and the NKVD). They were mortified by the thought of a Red India, fearing a domino effect as China would certainly be next to go Red and then the rest of Southeast Asia. The British were not wrong about Stalin’s goals, but would underestimate his cunning, his willingness to wait for years, and his methodical approach.

The Viscount Halifax, the new Prime Minister, was very keen on making a countermove to make it clear Britain would defend its Empire and intimidate Stalin into tiptoeing around it carefully in doing so. Halifax had succeeded Neville Chamberlain after the latter’s resignation in July 1940 after a bowel cancer diagnosis, of which he died in November (the 1939 UK general election had been won by the Tories). As French anti-German reservations as well as opportunistic Italian attempts to use this for their Balkan ambitions would slow down negotiations to a crawl, Halifax and his cabinet agreed to engage in direct bilateral talks with the Germans with backing from a Tory dominated House of Commons.

British ambassador Sir Ronald Ian Campbell (who’d been transferred from the embassy in Yugoslavia to Berlin) set out feelers in February 1942. He first approached German Foreign Minister Von Hassel, who in turn brought it to the attention of Chancellor Hans Vogel (successor to the deceased Otto Wels) and Emperor Louis I, who were highly receptive. Halifax subsequently sent his successor as Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to Berlin with the express goal of negotiating an Anglo-German mutual defence pact. He arrived on Tuesday June 2nd. Eden primarily spoke with Chancellor Vogel and Foreign Minister Count Von Hassel at the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstraβe in Berlin, conveniently located right next to the British embassy and the luxurious Hotel Adlon where Eden was staying. Eden and ambassador Campbell had frequent tête-à-têtes and sent telegrams to London, or directly phoned the PM. Though German Emperor Louis I’s position was that of a constitutional monarch, Eden made a courtesy visit to him, meeting him at the grand Prussian Baroque “New Palace” in Potsdam, his favourite residence.

It was also the preferred domicile of his grandfather Wilhelm II, who’d been allowed to return to Germany as “Prince Wilhelm of Prussia” in 1939 (and died of a heart attack aged 85 in March 1944). Wilhelm II and Eden briefly interacted, with the former commenting in fluent, flawless English that “your country has finally gotten wise by signing an alliance with mine to contain the Russian bear, something that should have been done forty years ago. I’m sure we could’ve come to an amicable agreement on spheres of influence in my time if your country hadn’t been under the spell of those perfidious French. Then we would have been in 1902 where we are now, with the German army checking the Russians on land and the Royal Navy blocking their access to the sea.” Eden didn’t have the time to debate with the old ex-Kaiser on what could’ve been and simply answered “perhaps, perhaps.” In his old age Wilhelm II was as obnoxious and in your face as he’d always been.

The Anglo-German Alliance was formalized on Thursday June 18th 1942. It was a defensive military pact that simply stated that either signatory would come to the aid of the other in the event of aggression by a third party. Though the treaty never once referred to the Soviet Union, the division of labour made it clear what kind of conflict the Anglo-German Alliance was geared to: the Imperial German Army would do most of the fighting on land in a European war while Britain would send an expeditionary force to assist; the British Royal Navy would make sure the sea lanes to its European allies would stay open whilst blocking the enemy’s access to global trade; the exceptions were the Baltic Sea, where the Imperial German Navy would take the lead, and the North Sea, where the Royal Navy and the German fleet would cooperate.

In the summer of 1942 it was anything but clear if the German army would be able to take on the role that its alliance duties assigned to it. While the army was excellently organized, possessed the most professional officers corps in the world and was on the forefront in many areas of equipment, it was not a large army for a country the size of Germany and dwarfed in terms of sheer manpower by the Red Army. German officers knew the USSR could field millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks and that its war industries were out of the range of the Luftwaffe. German military leaders were sceptical of Poland’s ability to stop a Soviet attack on their territory, even with German help. They pessimistically estimated that a full-blown Soviet invasion of Europe could not be stopped at the Oder River by Germany, putting the capital of Berlin at risk of becoming a battlefield.

The relatively small size of the German army was not a problem that could be redressed very quickly due to financial constraints. Hitler’s economic policy of gigantic deficit spending to stimulate the economy, with a particular focus on crash remilitarization, had left the country with a towering debt. Germany had successfully renegotiated its debts to avoid becoming penniless thanks to the fact that its creditors recognized a German economic crash would trigger a European recession. Such an economic crisis would, most likely, not remain limited to Europe and instead become a global economic crunch. The price of the creditors was that the German army’s had to be frozen at its 1938 size and that the navy had to scratch ambitious plans for expansion, instead choosing to only complete what the shipyards were already building or even less.

Germany reluctantly informed its British ally of this pressing financial problem that prevented any significant military expansion on its part. Though Wall Street had long since replaced it as the world’s leading financial centre, the City of London still had deep pockets. These were now used to make Germany’s debt more manageable, something that would have taken years more if the German government had been left to its own devices. Of course the British had an interest of their own in helping the impecunious Germans: they had no intent of maintaining a large standing army in peacetime next to their massive navy. A number of low interest loans were granted to Germany by Great Britain with an undetermined duration, meaning Germany could take as long as it wanted to repay them while using them to pay off its other debts. The financial breathing space afforded to Berlin by this was tremendous.

Germany announced an ambitious military expansion program in late 1942 to catch up after more than three years of close to zero growth of the army. The Imperial German Army was to expand to a peacetime strength of 800.000 men over the next two years. A large pool of reservists was to be created by resuming conscription, which included drafting the recruits of the years 1939-’42 retroactively. This was a massive organizational and logistical challenge, but the German army pulled it off. As to the tank fleet, the Panzer II and III were to be phased out in favour of the bigger, more heavily armed and armoured Panzer IV. The Luftwaffe would also be expanded and modernized with the Fw 190 replacing the Bf 109 as the main fighter, the Henschel Hs 129 replacing the Ju 87 as the main dive bomber, more Heinkel He 111 and Ju 88 medium bombers being built, and a request to aircraft producers to come up with a design for a long range “Siberia bomber.”

As to the navy, it was mostly a matter of consolidation. The core of the surface fleet consisted of two Bismarck-class battleships, two Scharnhorst-class battleships, three Deutschland class heavy cruisers and three Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruisers. Of the two planned Graf Zeppelin-class carriers only the namesake of the class was commissioned in 1943, the second being relegated to duty as floating barracks to cut costs (until being scrapped in 1955). The last two Admiral Hipper-class cruisers, Seydlitz and Lützow, were converted to light aircraft carriers in 1942-’43 to compensate. German naval construction for the surface fleet was limited to light cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats, gunboats and auxiliary vessels in the mid-40s to support this core of capital ships. Among what little surface ship construction took place were the München-class light cruisers: six 9.300 tonne vessels with eight 150 mm (5.9 inch) guns as their main armament.

A force of four battleships, one aircraft carrier, two light aircraft carriers, six heavy cruisers and twelve light cruisers was enough for Germany’s needs. More naval construction took place in the area of U-boats, increasing the size of Germany’s submarine fleet from a mere 55 U-boats in 1942 to 75 in 1946. That would be enough to deal with the Soviets. In the struggle for dominance, the submarine arm led by Admiral Dönitz hadn’t decisively won over Raeder’s expensive ambitions to build a massive fleet of battleships as he was kept on a short leash too, since it was decided Germany only needed a navy big enough to operate in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Battleships were the super weapons and prestige objects of their age and cost tonnes of money. U-boats, on the other hand, had proven effective in the Great War and were cheap to build in numbers. This Kriegsmarine would see action in due time.

 

[Onkel Willie]

I edited the segment about the German naval build-up to include a, hopefully, more realistic number of U-boats. I also have a new update ready for you.

Chapter X: The Zaolzie War, 1943.​

Meanwhile Stalin undertook diplomatic manoeuvres to improve the Soviet Union’s position in Eastern Europe in mid to late 1942 and early 1943 (with the effort in Spain winding down). The first move, in August 1942, was for Soviet ambassador in Prague Sergey Aleksandrovsky to assure Prime Minister Klement Gottwald – at the helm of a coalition in which the communists were the largest party – that Moscow would back Czechoslovakia if it decided to settle the matter of the continuing illegal Polish occupation of the Zaolzie region by force of arms. He remained vague about what that support would consist of, but Gottwald took it as military backing. The timing was no coincidence since by 1942 Czechoslovakia had had enough time to rebuild with Soviet help, besides the fact that it still enjoyed Western sympathy.

Another step was to bring the Soviet Union’s nearby neighbour Lithuania into play using the 1926 Soviet-Lithuanian Non-Aggression Pact, which reaffirmed the provisions of the 1920 peace treaty between the two countries. Among other things this meant Lithuania wouldn’t join alliances against the USSR but also that the latter recognized the former’s claim on the Vilnius region despite Poland’s control of it. Stalin connected these two pawns indirectly by having ambassador Aleksandrovsky suggest to Gottwald the possibility of a Czechoslovak-Lithuanian pact to settle their irredentist claims. A secret alliance was formed when Gottwald met President of Lithuania Antanas Smetona in the provisional Lithuanian capital of Kaunas in November. They agreed to act in unison with Prague taking the lead: as soon as it threatened military action over Zaolzie, Lithuania would do the same over Vilnius.

On Monday January 25th 1943 a communique was issued by Prague, stating that they were willing to remove Polish forces through “military means” if diplomacy failed to convince Poland to return Zaolzie. Prague reiterated that the Polish occupation was illegal as Czechoslovakia had never signed the territory over nor recognized Warsaw’s claims over it, and neither had the rest of the world. There had been innumerable diplomatic protests to that effect, but never with the threat of military force until now, albeit a vague threat for lack of an ultimatum. President of Poland Ignacy Mościcki as well as de facto leader Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, backed by their government, stubbornly maintained that the Zaolzie region belonged to Poland as Poles had always historically been the largest ethnic group (ignoring that in the more recent past the Czechs had become the majority). When Lithuania reiterated its claims to the Vilnius region to increase the pressure on Poland, the response was the same.

Since the Poles remained impervious to threats, a clear cut ultimatum followed one week later on February 1st. Prague announced military action against the Polish occupation of the Zaolzie region if Polish forces didn’t evacuate the area on their own accord within another week. Czechoslovakia and Lithuania unveiled their secret alliance the same day, informing Warsaw that they’d be facing a threat from the north as well if they didn’t heed the ultimatum. Both countries carried out partial mobilizations. The militaristic Polish regime, the so-called “colonels’ government”, stuck to its guns. They had confidence they would win if it came to war.

Poland had several reasons to be optimistic about a confrontation. Firstly, the Polish Army was numerically superior with 1 million men in 39 divisions and sixteen brigades compared to 600.000 men in the Czechoslovakian Army. Poland had less as well as obsolete aircraft, a much smaller tank force and was roughly equal in terms of artillery, but optimists estimated that Poland’s greater numbers would win through. Secondly, Rydz-Śmigły judged that Lithuania posed no military threat. Its armed forces numbered three infantry divisions, one cavalry brigade, three tank companies and one armoured car company supported by a very small air force and a virtually non-existent navy. All-in-all, Lithuania could barely field 50.000 troops, so not a challenge.

Rydz-Śmigły believed France would honour its commitment to the Franco-Polish Alliance, particularly in the event of a Soviet intervention. As to the other major European powers, the Poles estimated the Germans would chip in as they would want to maintain Poland as a buffer state between Germany and the USSR. Besides that, the Polish leadership believed Britain could no longer afford neutrality if the matter escalated to this point. Italy, if nothing else, would certainly distract the Soviets in the Balkans. In short, Poland believed that the four leading European powers would come to its aid if push came to shove. Poland was confident that being confronted by a joint Anglo-German-French-Italian-Polish quintuple alliance would make the Soviets back off.

Stalin, however, had assessed the constellation of powers better and correctly predicted an unwillingness from the British, French and Germans to intervene militarily at this point as long as he didn’t intervene directly. They were reluctant even though they recognized this Eastern European crisis could become a serious regional war at the very least, one which could end badly for Poland, formally an ally of France since 1921. Several reasons ensured that the major European powers that Poland was counting on in this crisis didn’t intervene on Poland’s behalf. This knowledge is painful with the benefit of today’s 20/20 hindsight, as we now know the quintuple alliance Poland had envisioned would probably have inflicted a difficult stalemate on the USSR at least.

When push came to shove Czechoslovakia had been more successful at gaining the West’s sympathy as it had been protesting to the Polish occupation of Zaolzie for more than four years straight without any Polish attempt to compromise. The rest of the world recognized the border as established in 1920 by a decision of the Spa Conference. Britain and France in particular had urged the Poles to give up their control of this small, insignificant speck on the map that wasn’t worth fighting over. France’s position was influenced by the fact that Czechoslovakia was an ally too through the Little Entente; France had bilateral alliances with each member (Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia). The proud Poles, who had not had a country of their own for 123 years, considered every square centimetre significant. After Prague’s ultimatum, the French and the British had urged Warsaw to withdraw and accept a referendum under League of Nations supervision to save face. Its result would be a foregone conclusion, but then Poland would be able to say the people had decided fair and square, and it was likely to still result in minor border corrections in Poland’s favour that could be presented as a success. Warsaw rejected this solution. In Paris the choice was made to favour the Czechs over the Poles. The German government, well aware of how it would look if they sided against Czechoslovakia after the Sudeten War, sided with Britain and France in the matter. As a result, Poland stood alone.

Poland’s leadership obstinately decided to fight despite the fact that not even France, its principal Western ally, supported it as it believed the military odds were still in its favour. Czechoslovakia launched its offensive on February 8th at 05:00 AM with a tank division rushing into Zaolzie and overwhelming the Polish defenders, taking the disputed area in one day. Simultaneously, the so-called Krakow-Warsaw Offensive was launched in southern Poland with a third of a million men with the plan being to advance along the Vistula toward Warsaw and split the country in two. The Poles countered with 500.000 men as their mobilization was only partially complete, but quickly learned superior numbers weren’t everything. The Poles fielded 350 tanks and 800 tankettes versus 1.800 Czechoslovak tanks. Furthermore, the main Czechoslovak tank, the LT-38, proved to be better than the Polish 7TP as well: while equal in main armament with a 37 mm gun, the LT-38 had two 7.92 mm machine guns instead of one, heavier armour, greater speed and greater range. The newer 14TP did better, but it faced the ST vz. 39 in turn. Czechoslovakia also had more and better aircraft. With air support, Czechoslovak tank divisions punched holes in the Polish front and advanced deep into the hinterland, causing chaos there and forcing a Polish withdrawal to prevent their front from being crushed. As Czechoslovak forces reached Sandomierz within six weeks, this was an early example of successful Deep Operations. Lithuania attacked in the north and captured Vilnius thanks to the threatening Polish collapse on the Vistula Front. Unbeknownst to anyone the Soviet contribution consisted of more than just weapons deliveries and training. A Soviet field army sized force had secretly fought in Czech and Lithuanian uniforms to test the effects of the military reforms of the past few years. This would remain secret for many years to come.

On Tuesday March 23rd 1943, Poland requested an armistice. The peace terms were laid down in the Treaty of Vilnius signed on Friday May 7th, which solely determined that Poland had to return Zaolzie to Czechoslovakia and Vilnius to Lithuania respectively. The brief Zaolzie War of ’43, as it has since become known, had the more serious diplomatic ramification of leaving Poland diplomatically isolated due to its own behaviour and exactly like Stalin wanted it. This was compounded by a lack of unity between Britain, France and Germany as the authorities in the Free City of Danzig had allowed a referendum about reunification with Germany that the latter happily ratified. Over some faint diplomatic protests from Poland, Danzig was formally annexed by Germany in May 1943 (Poland couldn’t alienate Germany too much, so it let the matter slide). The British frowned upon the German move, and the French doubly.

This disunity enabled Stalin to get away with one more thing: he browbeat Lithuania into signing a military alliance which allowed the Soviets to establish military bases on their territory. Lithuania would see a communist coup and the country would then “petition” to join the USSR, falling under a brutal Soviet occupation. Latvia and Estonia would meet the same fate within one year and other than diplomatic protests no-one did anything about it. The Baltic States were too small to go to war over.

The Zaolzie War was merely a prelude of what was to come, a test of the Deep Operations doctrine that had been developed in the 1920s and 30s for the Red Army and which it had finally adopted after the lessons learnt in the Sudeten War. It was a principle that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact, but throughout the depth of the battlefield. Soviet advisors had also introduced it into the Czechoslovakian Army over the past four years, which had eagerly adopted it as a means to overcome its larger neighbours. The result of its use against Poland was everything Soviet military observers had hoped for and Stalin knew what he needed to know for his next move.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Russian bear angry at Japan!

Chapter XI: The Soviet-Japanese War, 1943-1944.​

The ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War remained an ongoing concern and source of tensions in East Asia. It looked like the war could last for many more years as China by itself lacked the strength to evict the Japanese invaders. During his first and second terms Roosevelt had done little to help China and even struck trade agreements with Japan. The lobby to aid China grew after events like the Rape of Nanjing and the sinking of the USS Panay sharply swung public opinion against Japan, even more so when things like the use of chemical and biological weapons on civilians was revealed by the press. Between 1937 and 1940, the United States exported over $700 million worth of military supplies and a total amount of goods worth $1 billion. The pressure to stop supplying Japan with the goods needed to sustain the war in China and continue to mete out terror to the Chinese people grew. During his third and final term, however, Roosevelt, didn’t proceed much beyond increasing export duties for goods to Japan, which made it more expensive but not impossible for Japan to buy what it needed in the US: replacement parts, oil, steel, rubber and so on. Washington DC also issued some major loans to the Kuomintang regime so they could import weapons and fuel from European countries and their colonies. Japan didn’t like these moves at all, but the threat didn’t come from the USA as some in Tokyo feared, but from another completely unexpected direction: the Soviet Union. And the pro-China lobby would cheer for them.

Soviet-Japanese border conflicts had been taking place since 1932. Japanese expansion in Manchuria, which bordered the Soviet Far East, and disputes over the demarcation line led to tensions and border violations as well as accusations of the other doing so. Unintentional violations took place between Manchukuo and the Mongolian People’s Republic, but there were also acts of espionage. Soviet-Japanese relations hit rock bottom with the Soviets calling the Japanese “fascists” at the 7th Comintern Congress in July 1935. The border conflicts escalated into full-scale battles in the late 30s with the Battle of Lake Khasan (July-August 1938) and the Battle of Khalkhin Gol (May-September 1939) being the largest. The Battle of Lake Khasan was a Japanese tactical success as they had suffered a lot less casualties against a much larger force, but it’s considered a Soviet victory as the Japanese withdrew from Changkufeng and accepted a diplomatic settlement. The Battle of Khalkhin Gol escalated from border skirmishes into corps-sized engagements in which the Soviets had the edge in manpower and armament. After a stalemate following a Japanese attack and a Soviet counterattack in July, probing attacks in August, and a Soviet build-up, the battle ended in a resounding Soviet victory. In late August the Red Army obliterated Japanese forces at Nomonhan on the Soviet side of the Halha River. This resulted in the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact being signed in April 1941.

In the two years that followed Japan pursued its ongoing war in China with supreme confidence that there wouldn’t be any further foreign interference now that the rivalry with the USSR was settled and that Roosevelt had to consider the isolationist lobby before doing anything. With its northern flank secure, Japan redoubled its efforts to conquer more of China by redeploying forces from Manchuria to other fronts in China. Its puppet states Manchukuo, Mengjiang and Wang Jingwei’s republican puppet government in Nanjing proved ineffective and unpopular, largely because of Japanese atrocities and their unwillingness to delegate any real power. The irony escaped them. They did realize this left further military campaigns as the only course of action (the Collaborationist Chinese Army, numbering up to 700.000 men, was only suitable for maintaining public security in occupied areas).

The Imperial Japanese Army’s campaigns of the years 1941-’43 focused on the southern coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Japan only controlled some coastal pockets in those provinces and wanted to extend its complete control down to the border with French Indochina, which would heavily involve the navy in support of amphibious operations. The Imperial Japanese Navy demonstrated its mighty super battleships Yamato and Musashi, which used their 46 cm (18.1 inch) main guns for coastal bombardment and suppressive fire against targets further inland (the revelation of the actual size of these ships spurred the other naval powers to build ships to match). The Chinese navy was merely a riverine force and posed no challenge at all. Japan’s heavy combined army-navy operations were successful in achieving the objective, which meant that by spring 1943 the entire length of China’s coast was under Japanese control. The result was that the powers supporting China could only supply it by much more difficult overland routes from now on. Still, Japan only controlled about a third of China and it still looked like the war would last for years, even decades.

Japan pressed forward, innumerable international protests notwithstanding as Tokyo was confident no-one would act. After all, the Second Sino-Japanese War had begun in 1937 and if anyone had wanted to do something about it they would have by now. The war itself now became a stalemate: China was too weak to push the Japanese invaders out, but Japan wasn’t powerful enough to advance further. A 1943 American caricature summarized the war strikingly by depicting an aggressive tiger attacking an old elephant; the tired elephant was too big for the tiger, but the latter continued to attack and bite of chunks of flesh off nonetheless. The war had lasted for six years by now and could last for many more years if no-one intervened.

Stalin’s paranoid mind was confident that the bilateral Anglo-German pact would transform into a quadripartite anti-Soviet bloc that would include France and Italy too. Stalin believed such a force would ultimately culminate in a general Western effort to smother communism in Europe at the very least, overturning Moscow’s recent successes in Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Spain. Stalin interpreted European non-interference in China as tacit approval for Japanese imperialism and feared it wouldn’t end there, believing the European great powers would ally with Tokyo to invade the USSR from both sides. The Soviet tyrant saw two possible ways of neutralizing a European-Japanese bloc: allying with Japan and dividing China into spheres of influence or allying with China to drive Japan out of the country and maybe even out of the Asian mainland. Believing the Western colonial powers secretly sided with Japan, in contrast to their public statements, Stalin decided he would attack the Japanese soon. He didn’t believe Japan could be trusted if he allied with them.

Operation Mongol was the Soviet Union’s codename for their planned invasion of Manchuria, which was set to take place in August 1943. Soviet planners knew from intelligence that the Kwantung Army in Manchuria had been decreased to 500.000 men as Japan had redeployed troops to other theatres in China. Stavka wasn’t about to take any chances when it came to a full scale war with Japan and planned to attack with over twice as many men to ensure success. The operation would involve 1.2 million men, 20.000 artillery pieces, 1.000 Katyusha rocket launchers, 5.000 tanks and other armoured vehicles, and 3.000 aircraft. Imperial Japanese forces numbered half a million men, 4.500 artillery guns, 1.900 tanks and other armoured vehicles, and 1.500 aircraft. Manchukuo’s army numbered another 170.000 men. In the weeks leading up to the attack the Soviets built up their forces and using “maskirovka” managed to conceal this.

Outside Moscow, only Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his inner circle knew as the Soviets had informed them two months prior with instructions to keep this a complete secret (the communists were not informed as Stalin had decided to place all his bets on the nationalist KMT). They did as instructed and began preparing for offensives of their own in support, particularly in the Suiyuan and Shanxi provinces as these areas were closest to Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek intended to parade in Beijing after conquering it before the Soviets did, establishing himself as the leader of China rather than a puppet installed by Moscow.

The Soviets unleashed Operation Mongol on August 5th 1943, catching the Japanese completely by surprise as they hadn’t detected the build-up and felt secure due to the non-aggression pact in place between the two countries. In charge of the Soviet operation was Marshal Semyon Timoshenko (cronies like Voroshilov and Budyonny had fallen out of favour due to the problems the Red Army had faced in 1938). The operation began with a massive artillery bombardment at 04:30 AM with Katyusha rockets and shells up to a calibre of 152 mm. Having incorporated the lessons of 1938, the Red Army had completed its transformation to a mechanized force capable of executing Deep Operations: tanks rushed into Manchuria with accurate air and artillery while infantry rapidly followed. The western pincer consisting of the Transbaikal Front advanced over the deserts and mountains of Mongolia, the eastern pincer consisting of the 1st Far Eastern Front crossed the Ussuri River around Khanka Lake and advanced to Suifenhe, and the 2nd Far Eastern Front acted in a supporting role by attacking Harbin and Qiqihar as well as attempting to prevent an orderly Japanese withdrawal.

What unfolded was an unmitigated military catastrophe for Japan and a Sino-Soviet triumph despite fierce and relentless Japanese resistance. The Soviet invasion, a double pincer movement over an area the size of Western Europe, was executed superbly. The Red Army had advanced deep into Manchukuo, taking Changchun, Qiqihar and ultimately Mukden in southern Manchuria on September 5th. This put them within 200 kilometres of the Yalu River, which constituted the border between Manchuria and Korea (a colony of Japan since its annexation in 1910). Meanwhile, three days after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria had begun, 400.000 men of the National Revolutionary Army under the personal command of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had launched the Datong-Taiyuan Offensive, the largest and most ambitious Chinese offensive in years. By early September, the Chinese advance had fallen far short of Beijing as they were halted 30 kilometres west of Baoding and 200 km southwest of Beijing, but it was the greatest success in years. Japanese generals feared Beijing and the sliver of Manchuria still under their control would be cut off from the rest of occupied China if the Kuomintang continued its advance eastward to the coast of the Bohai Sea.

The Soviet-Japanese War, also known as the Second Russo-Japanese War, continued as Tokyo refused a peace settlement propositioned by Stalin and Chiang. The deal would have them withdraw from mainland China completely and allow them to keep Korea and Taiwan, a peace the Soviets and the Chinese thought was face saving for the Japanese Chiang was upset about not getting Taiwan back in this offer, but the Soviets didn’t have the naval power to invade it. Japan’s refusal to entertain such a conditional surrender rendered the issue moot.

Japan’s political and military leaders, however, were imbued with a modern interpretation of the Bushido warrior code, which made them regard surrender as cowardly and dishonourable. Besides that, Japan had begun diplomatic offensives and wanted to await their outcome as they had highly unrealistic hopes about them. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo believed the Western powers would join Japan to prevent a communist China, but no such thing happened. Though there was some concern over the Soviet Union’s interference in China, the leaders of the West didn’t see Chiang Kai-shek as a communist. Secondly, the Western powers pretty much universally condemned Japan’s war of aggression in China. Post-Hitler Germany, the country Japan had counted on in particular, wasn’t interested in a war of aggression against the USSR. Mussolini was also secretly being courted by Moscow to come to an agreement about spheres of influence in the Balkans, so he wouldn’t have helped the Japanese even if he could have.

The war continued in the autumn of 1943, starting with an attempted Japanese counteroffensive against the Red Army after the Soviet advance had stopped at Mukden in early September. Believing the Soviets had run out of steam and had advanced too far from their logistical support, Japanese commanders considered this to be the right time for it. In an extremely unrealistic case of wishful thinking, they thought they could beat the Soviets with troops from other parts of China and fresh units from the Home Islands and then stymy any possible Chinese attempts to benefit from the current situation. The Japanese replenished their severe losses with troops from the rest of China, where they only left behind light screening forces. Forces were sent from Korea as well while reservists and fresh recruits were brought in from the Home Islands. The Mukden Offensive or Second Battle of Mukden, launched on September 15th, started with an artillery bombardment that saw the use of phosgene, chlorine and mustard gas. The element of surprise allowed the Japanese to advance rapidly and recapture Mukden, but this created a long protruding salient. Soviet resistance quickly stiffened and the Japanese had to withdraw to prevent the salient from being cut off and all the troops in it from being lost. The second Soviet capture has since become known as the Third Battle of Mukden and the beginning of the end for Japan’s colonial empire.

The immediate Soviet counteroffensive began with an enormous shelling with mustard gas to retaliate for Japan’s use of chemical weapons. The offensive resulted in the Japanese being driven across the Yalu River separating China from Korea by early October. As a result of the fact that the Imperial Japanese Army had only left behind light screening forces to get more manpower for its failed gambit at Mukden, a string of Chinese victories pushed the Japanese to the coast. Units of the Chinese Collaborationist Army surrendered in droves to the National Revolutionary Army. By far the greatest success was that Kuomintang forces indeed liberated Beijing on October 21st 1943, addressing the nation from the Tiananmen Gate whilst overseeing a military parade on Tiananmen Square. China had been at war for six years and Manchuria had been under occupation for twelve years. Chiang held a long speech, but most just remember its most important segment: “Dear countrymen, I hereby today formally declare that we, the Chinese people, have overcome the aggressive, premeditated fascist Japanese invaders through our own courage, hard work and perseverance. The significant help of our great Soviet ally, to whom we owe a great deal, must also not be forgotten. Now the war continues until Japan is no longer a threat to us and our Korean brethren are also free.”

While to many it came as a surprise, Chiang Kai-shek had already been aware that the war would continue into Korea since October 5th. Chiang arrived in Moscow by plane that day at noon for a summit with Soviet leader Stalin to discuss how to proceed given that Tokyo had rejected the terms of surrender presented to it one month ago. Chiang was driven to Stalin’s highly secure dacha in the town of Kuntsevo as Stalin felt safest there. It had a double-perimeter fence, camouflaged 30 mm anti-aircraft guns and a security force of 300 NKVD agents, which was doubled for this occasion. What quickly became clear that day during formal and informal moments switching between the dining room and Stalin’s study was that the Soviet leader wouldn’t stop at liberating China.

During their meeting Stalin quickly revealed he wouldn’t give the Japanese such lenient peace terms again if they changed their mind about peace. Chiang initially said he wouldn’t stop the Soviets from continuing their war against Japan and would allow them the use of Manchurian railways to supply their forces, but also that he wouldn’t participate militarily as the reconstruction of his country required all of his attention after its liberation. Stalin had expected this and used a set of simple yet compelling arguments to change Chiang’s mind. His first argument was that driving the Japanese back across the river Yalu simply wouldn’t suffice because they could use their colony Korea as a launchpad for future aggression to avenge their defeat after rebuilding their army.

Secondly, whilst preparing for revenge, Japan would definitely try to mobilize international opinion against China and its Soviet ally by pointing out to the Western capitalist colonial powers the threat of a strong, united and above all anti-imperialist China. Stalin provided intelligence data indicating the Japanese were already doing this. If Korea remained under Japanese rule, then it wouldn’t just become the staging area for a potential invasion of China (again) but also a conduit for Western imperialist powers to subdue China. Stalin told Chiang that “if our victory doesn’t neutralize Japan on mainland Asia, it will assemble the capitalist imperialist nations of the West to repeat what they did in 1901.” It was a reference to the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in which China suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Eight-Nation Alliance. All of this sounded very convincing to Chiang as he didn’t trust the Japanese either, and answered he was sympathetic to assisting a Soviet liberation of Korea.

The major stumbling block to China fighting on any longer was the terrible state of disrepair its economy and infrastructure were in after six years of brutal war against Japan. Besides the war damage, the Imperial Japanese Army had carried out a scorched earth policy during its withdrawal from Chinese soil. Mines, entire industrial areas full of factories, power plants, parts of the already underdeveloped electrical grid, railways, bridges and ports had all been left devastated. Beyond that, the war had cost an astronomical amount of money and rebuilding the country would require even more, which creditors were unlikely to give if China kept on fighting. Under these circumstances Chiang felt he could go no further than a “Chinese Expeditionary Force” of five to ten divisions, or circa 75.000-150.000 men.

A deal was signed known as the Sino-Soviet Commercial Agreement, which made China dependent on the USSR for years to come. The Soviet Union would annually supply the Republic of China with 1.4 million tonnes of grain, wheat and cereals, 2.5 million tonnes of coal, 1 million tonnes of petroleum, 500.000 tonnes of metallic ores like iron ore and manganese, 300.000 tonnes of steel, 250.000 tonnes of rubber, 90.000 of cement and 75.000 tonnes of phosphates for the next four years (1943-’47). The Soviets would continue to supply half that amount for the four years after that (’47-’51). In return Chiang Kai-shek agreed to a number of things. First of all, he unsurprisingly agreed to commit no less than thirty divisions or about 450.000 men to the continuation of the war against Japan in Korea. Secondly, he agreed to a fifty year lease of the Chinese Eastern Railway and a Soviet military presence within 30 km of its tracks. Lastly, he agreed to lease Dalian (known as Port Arthur until 1905) as a naval base to the Soviet Navy for fifty years as well.

The Red Army began its winter campaign by crossing the frozen Yalu River on December 1st and faced hastily erected Japanese defensive lines that used the mountainous geography of Korea to the greatest effect, slowing the pace of the Soviet invasion and seriously increasing its casualty rate. Japanese commanders hoped that through a tactically strong defence and sheer fanaticism the Soviets would come to see the war was too costly and not worth pursuing. Stalin didn’t care about casualties, only about results. He increased the strength of the Soviet presence in the Far East to 1.5 million men and with the Chinese Expeditionary Force added to that the manpower available to him reached 2 million. The numerical disparity was 2:1 and in certain areas of equipment like armour and artillery the gap was much greater than that, besides the Red Army’s qualitative edge in those areas. The result was that Korea was almost completely conquered in approximately ten weeks except for a pocket around Busan through which the navy evacuated the last soldiers under the cover fire of mighty battleship guns.

Korea’s future had already been decided on by Stalin: as it was a bit too big to be annexed and because it would serve the Soviet Union’s anti-imperialist credentials better, it would become independent. Stalin of course had a different interpretation of independence as he intended to transform the country into a vassal state ruled by a communist party on the Stalinist model. The Communist Party of Korea had operated underground for years, but now it emerged out in the open and in a utterly fraudulent elections won 80% of the vote for a new parliament, renamed to Supreme People’s Assembly. Its leader Pak Hon-yong assumed the post of Premier of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Its newly founded army, the Korean People’s Army, became the recipient of Soviets weapons, supplies and training. Its economy was developed in the same way as the Soviet Union’s with Five Year Plans emphasizing mining of the coal reserves and metallic ores it was well endowed with and building up heavy industry and military production.

As to ending the war, that should’ve been but a formality after the last Japanese troops had been evacuated from Busan on February 17th. Tokyo, however, stubbornly ignored the Soviet offer to end the war and imposed a naval blockade on Korean ports to enforce a total economic embargo. The tiny Soviet Pacific Fleet was powerless to stop it, though Soviet submarines did harass the Japanese and with a lucky hit sank battleship Yamashiro (this was the second time a U-boat sank a battleship, five years after the U-26, though this time it wasn’t a moored battleship but one ready to fight). What ultimately nullified the blockade was the fact that Japan didn’t dare to do the same to China as shooting at Western merchant vessels for not complying with the blockade would cost Japan what little sympathy it enjoyed in the West. Its attempts to create a Red Scare in the West didn’t pan out either as Korea was so far removed from their interests, though there was serious surprise that Japan was defeated so quickly. Japan enjoyed its only major military success of the war by conquering northern Sakhalin (the island had been partitioned with the northern half under Russian control while Japan controlled the south from 1905 onward). The war could’ve gone on indefinitely like this as the Soviets could not engage the enemy effectively anymore for lack of a serious navy. What they did have was an air force and Stalin had a score to settle for the continued use of chemical weapons during the fighting in Korea: 100 Il-4 bombers bombed the city of Sapporo on Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Home Islands, with mustard gas. The move was condemned internationally, but it had the desired effect: it showed the world he was not to be trifled with and forced Japan to the negotiating table.

In March diplomatic delegations of the USSR, the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan convened in Mukden, not coincidentally a city with significant Russian influence but also the site of the Mukden Palace (the official residence of the first three Qing Emperors, back when the Qing Dynasty wasn’t a source of embarrassment yet). In Treaty of Mukden Japan gave up its concessions in China, which Chinese forces had occupied anyway, and returned to the pre-1937 border other than that. This meant that Taiwan, heavily Japanized and under Tokyo’s control since 1895, remained part of Japan as its only remaining colony. Chinese demands that would’ve humiliated Japan and couldn’t be enforced like a formal apology, war reparations and extradition of former Emperor Pu Yi to stand trial for treason didn’t make it to the final draft (Pu Yi died in exile in Britain in 1981, where he moved after fleeing to Japan, after writing his bestselling autobiography titled “The Last Emperor”). Stalin was in no mood to drag the war out longer than necessary for China’s pride. As to Korea, Japan reluctantly recognized its independence, but annexed the Liancourt Rocks, Ulleungdo Island and Jeju Island despite Korean claims. Jeju, the largest of these islands, saw the arrival of 200.000 Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese. Japan also kept northern Sakhalin as a consolation prize. This treaty formally ended the war on May 1st 1944, Labour Day, making this Soviet holiday even more joyous. Stalin had secured his eastern flank.

The Soviet Union had gained an ally in Chiang Kai-shek. His enthusiasm about Asian nationalism flared up after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1944. As far as Chiang was concerned China would replace Japan as the leading power of Asia. After Japan had clearly abused anti-imperialist, pan-Asian rhetoric as a front for its own brutal form of colonialism, Chiang Kai-shek presented Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles as a genuine alternative and the best hope for all those Asian peoples longing for freedom. Chiang’s ambitions were observed with great interest by Moscow as a strong enough China could distract the Western powers thousands of miles from home.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time!

Chapter XII: Soviet Power, the Super Battleships and the Frankfurt Agreement, 1944-1945.​

The Soviet Union’s tremendous victory over Imperial Japan in a war that had lasted for only nine months was unexpected, starkly contrasting against the equally unexpected Russian defeat in 1905. It also far exceeded the Red Army’s mediocre performance in Czechoslovakia in 1938, as seen by foreign military observers. The country was subsequently finally accepted by the West as a great power, accompanied by modified Western estimates concerning its military abilities that came slightly closer to the threat level actually posed by the USSR.

Western estimates of Soviet military strength still didn’t come close. By 1943, Stalin had built a force of 500 divisions and this army had 60.000 of the new T-34 tanks, which later came to be considered one of the best tanks in the world. It replaced the slow moving T-26 infantry and the fast BT cavalry tanks, the latter of which hadn’t enjoyed any combat advantage in recent conflicts despite its 85 km/h top road speed. Both tanks had proven vulnerable due to poor welds of the fuel tanks, which burst aflame if hit by a shell or by a Molotov cocktail. The prototype A-20 was developed into the “universal tank” more commonly known as the T-34 today, and it entered mass production in early 1941. In 1943-’44, the T-34 already proved far superior to Japanese tanks. Among the infantry, the Mosin-Nagant five-shot bolt-action rifle had been replaced by the SVT-40 battle rifle, which had a 10-round detachable box magazine, proving itself in battle in 1943 too.

In terms of organization, the army itself had undergone motorization so true Deep Operations were possible, with the infantry keeping up with the armour and logistics being vastly improved in 1943 compared to 1938. Communications had also seen serious developments, resulting in far more accurate artillery and far greater cooperation between ground and air forces. Though radios on every tank had proven too much, at least every command tank had one. The Soviet Air Force was a beast in its own right, fielding 75.000 aircraft of various types ranging from liaison, reconnaissance and transport aircraft to fighters, attack aircraft and bombers in 1943. In the skies over Manchuria and Korea, a number of Soviet aviators became aces in the Yak-9 by downing their fair share of A6M Zeroes. Whilst the Zero was the best in 1940, the Soviet Yak-9 introduced in 1942 was faster and had a higher rate of climb and higher service ceiling whilst roughly equal in armament. A standard tactic Yak-9 pilots developed against the Zeroes was to fly close to their service ceiling, preferably with the sun behind them as this would blind the enemy, and dive upon spotting a Zero formation from above. The Soviet Air Force’s symbol of Deep Operations, however, was the Ilyushin Il-2 ground attack aircraft, called the “flying tank” because it was so heavily armed. Its enemies came to fear it greatly.

The Soviet Navy had long been the red-headed stepchild of the Soviet Armed Forces as the USSR’s shipyards hadn’t produced anything bigger than a cruiser before 1943. As a result, the navy hadn’t played only a minor, unimpressive role in the war against Japan. The Soviet Pacific Fleet was incapable of carrying out an operation to retake northern Sakhalin, as Stalin had wanted, because the Japanese would sink the hypothetical supporting Soviet flotilla with a far superior force of aircraft carriers and battleships (despite the negligible distance to the mainland, less than ten kilometres, a Soviet invasion to retake the northern part of Sakhalin would likely have ended in abject failure). The 11.300 tonne Lazov, a Chapayev-class light cruiser, was the only thing bigger than a destroyer in the Soviet Pacific Fleet in 1943 and its only action was staying in port protected by minefields as Vladivostok was blockaded by the Japanese. She was damaged by air attacks during this time. The one spectacular victory the Soviet Navy enjoyed was one of their submarines sinking the Yamashiro, a modernized WW I vintage battleship. This hadn’t changed the outcome of the war by one bit.

Stalin, however, had had the ambition since the 30s to build a navy capable of acting on the world stage like the Red Army had already done in its “glorious anti-imperialist war” in the Far East. To that end a class of 59.000 tonne battleships with nine 406 mm (16 inch) guns and up to 420 mm (16.5 inch) belt armour was being built. Each ship would also have six twin 152 mm (6 inch) guns, six twin 100 mm (3.9 inch) dual-purpose guns, and then quadruple 37 mm (1.5 inch) anti-aircraft guns. The Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleships experienced numerous difficulties during construction and had design flaws: cemented armour thicker than 230 mm (9.1 inches) could not be made, lessening the advantage of its thick belt armour; the rejection rate of the steel delivered for these ships was 30-40%; the Pugliese torpedo defence system was implemented in an inferior way compared to how the Italians had sold it; additionally the holding bulkhead for it was only 35 rather than 40 mm and made with heat welding and riveting rather than continuous welding; the bow shape and 'bulb' is considered to be wrong, increasing the block coefficient of the ship, causing the ship to go down by the nose to an excessive degree, which was a problem in high seas; the ship would’ve been better off with four or five-bladed propellers instead of the three-bladed props she got; and the boilers were also considered to be under-dimensioned; the ships boilers couldn’t generate the 231.000 shp for long as the pressure could make them blow up; and the props weren’t designed for such power, which would cause cavitation and ruin them. In practice the issues with the boilers and props meant the ships wouldn’t go faster than 24 knots for extended periods of time. They only reached their designed top speed of 28 knots during short bursts.

The result of all these design and construction problems was that the lead ship of the class took nearly six years to build and commission. The Sovetsky Soyuz was commissioned in May 1944, after she’d been laid down in July 1938 by Shipyard Nr. 189 (Ordzhonikidze) in Leningrad, joining the Baltic Fleet. Her sister ship Sovetskaya Ukraina was built at Shipyard Nr. 198 (Marti South) in Nikolayev and joined the Black Sea Fleet in October 1944. The second pair, the Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya, was built at Shipyard Nr. 402 in Molotovsk and joined the Northern Fleet in the White Sea in 1946. It was considered to build two more now that the slipways were all clear, but the burden this would place on Soviet steel production and its shipyards made Moscow decide against it.

It had taken the Soviet Union eight troublesome years to build four battleships, which were of questionable value given the type of war Soviet strategists envisioned: wars on land against neighbouring countries. These four battleships were prestige objects that the USSR’s shipbuilding industry had struggled to build and could barely support, never mind building and maintaining nine more of these giants (they were arguably the lesser ones among the final generation of battleships). The Kronshtadt-class battlecruisers enjoyed the same fate as Stalin’s naval construction program was much more ambitious than his shipyards and armaments factories could handle. The unrealistic plan to build sixteen of these 39.000 tonne ships with six 38 cm (15 inch) guns was reduced to only three. Kronshtadt joined the Baltic Fleet, the Sevastopol joined the Black Sea Fleet (the existing Gangut-class battleship Sevastopol had been renamed Parizhskaya Kommuna in 1921) and the Arkhangelsk was converted into a 35.000 tonne carrier and joined the Northern Fleet.

This was the end of Soviet capital ship construction. The construction of both the Sovetskaya Soyuz-class battleships and to a lesser extent the Kronshtadt-class battlecruisers had been riddled with difficulties, so much so that Stalin’s ambitious plan for an oceangoing navy was quietly shelved until further notice. The Soviet admiralty revived the Jeune École, a strategic naval concept developed in France in the 19th century that advocated the use of smaller but heavily armed ships to combat battleships and commerce raiding to cripple enemy trade. From now on the focus would be on small, cheap ships that were easy to build in numbers, particularly submarines and torpedo boats. The largest ships to come off the slipways was the Leningrad-class heavy cruisers, the Soviet version of a pocket battleship: an 18.000 tonne ship with six 305 mm (12 inch) guns in three twin turrets. With a speed of 33 knots they’d be able to outrun any battleship and easily catch slow freighters, making this class ideal for commerce raiding. They were also more heavily armed than any other heavy cruiser, giving enemy ships smaller than a battleship or battlecruiser a run for their money, which earned them the unofficial classification of “cruiser killers”. After all the planned capital ships had been scratched, sixteen of these were laid down in 1946-’47 so each of the four fleets of the Soviet Navy (Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific) would have four. Four 16.200 tonne light aircraft carriers based on the Leningrad-class’s hull, known as the Murmansk-class, were laid down for the Northern Fleet. That was the only one of the four Soviet fleets with free access to the high seas.

The other European powers more than outbuilt the Soviets in terms of capital ship construction and the battleship rivalry was alive as ever with no-one interested in a new naval treaty (construction on much less prestigious aircraft carriers and submarines continued unabated too). The British were on the forefront of this naval rivalry as First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill was very keen on preserving Britain’s position as the premier naval power. Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1940 by Halifax and continued in that role after the Tories stayed in power after the 1943 UK general election, occupying the office that he had also served in during the Great War until the 1915 catastrophe at Gallipoli. The Royal Navy had completed all six Lion-class fast battleships, 41.200 tonne vessels with nine 16 inch (406 mm) guns, by 1944. To rival the super battleships that some countries had built, the Lions were quickly succeeded by a British class of super battleships, the Queen Victoria-class battleships: three 60.000 tonne ships with nine 18 inch (45.7 cm) guns in triple turrets.

France had built four 38.000 tonne Richelieu-class battleships with eight 380 mm (15 inch) guns in two unique forward facing quadruple turrets; the 47.800 tonne Alsace-class that succeeded them had three such turrets, for a total of twelve 380 mm (15 inch) guns. Two Joffre-class carriers, later reclassified as light carriers, were built too. Italy wasn’t content with its four Littorio-class battleships, each with nine 38 cm guns, but couldn’t produce a larger gun calibre. The solution was more guns: the two Garibaldi-class battleships, Garibaldi and Mazzini, would have twelve 38 cm (15 inch) guns in four triple turrets and were effectively enlarged Littorio-class battleships. The Conte di Cavour-class battleships, the oldest in service in the Regia Marina, were placed in reserve in 1947 as the two new battleships entered service. By that time Italy had also built two aircraft carriers: Aquila and Sparviero.

With the Scharnhorst class (32.600 tonnes, nine 28 cm/11 inch guns) and the Bismarck-class (41.700 tonnes, eight 38 cm/15 inch guns) the Kriegsmarine only had four battleships, making it a modest navy. After years of zero new capital ship construction, Germany laid down the two Kaiser Wilhelm-class battleships, which were essentially enlarged and modified versions of the preceding Bismarck-class (56.000 tonnes, eight 40.6 cm/16 inch guns). They were named Kaiser Wilhelm and Prinz Heinrich. Two Mackensen-class fast battleships named Mackensen and Prinz Eitel Friedrich were built simultaneously. These were improved versions of the Scharnhorst-class with six 38 cm (15 inch) instead of nine 28 cm (11 inch) guns as well as some other incremental improvements in their armour layout and anti-aircraft defences.

Outside Europe, construction of the latest and final generation of battleships continued rapidly as well. Of all battleships in service the Yamato-class remained the heaviest with their full load weight of 73.000 tonnes, 410 mm (16.1 inch) belt armour and nine 46 cm (18.1 inch) main guns, the biggest guns on any battleship. The world had gotten to know Yamato and Musashi for their service against China, and Shinano, Kii and Izumo followed. After four Iowa-class battleships, the United States had begun building the Montana-class battleships in 1942 to counter their Yamato-class rivals as well as match what the other naval powers were fielding. All five of these 64.000 tonne leviathans, with twelve 16 inch (406 mm) in four triple turrets, had been commissioned by 1948. They were the latest of what turned out to be the last generation of battleships worldwide, the super battleships.

Completely aside from the renewed naval race, the two strongest countries of Europe had become more and more intertwined, militarily, economically and politically. While the Royal Navy ruled the sea lanes in the interest of its allies and of course primarily for its own Empire, Germany’s army reached the intended size of one million men in peacetime by 1946. This could be increased to eight million in wartime, making the Imperial German Army the second largest army in the world after the Red Army (which could reach a wartime strength of 15 million men). Anglo-German military strength would’ve been enough to cow the rest of Europe, with only France and Italy having a chance to stand up to them. London and Berlin, however, used a decidedly more soft power approach in Europe (Stalin nonetheless believed in an anti-Soviet “Anglo-German axis” and the Soviet propaganda machine agitated against it fiercely).

As to economic relations, Germany’s hungry armaments industry eagerly bought resources that couldn’t be provided by the domestic market from suppliers within the British Empire. The Germans got discounts other buyers didn’t get. Economic cooperation didn’t limit itself to what was required for the military alliance between the two countries. The global economy was booming and both countries sported major consumer goods industries which heavily competed with each other, leading to quality and innovation. For example, British and German electronics producers heavily competed to sell a new technology to consumers presented as the mass medium destined to replace radio: the television. The two countries, however, shied away from a trade war because they didn’t want tensions in that area getting in the way their politico-military alliance. They aspired to cooperation in the area of economy too.

Rather than erecting protectionist tariff walls against each other, delegations from Britain and Germany signed the Frankfurt Agreement in 1945: Great Britain and Imperial Germany founded a customs union, i.e. a trade bloc with free trade area and a common external tariff. Their currencies, the pound sterling and the Deutschmark, didn’t compete with each other but formed a united front against the mightiest competitor, the US dollar. Germany and Britain were still the world’s second and third economies (after the United States, with whom normal diplomatic relations were maintained) which together made them an influential economic bloc. Smaller European powers like the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and Sweden gravitated toward them and either joined the Frankfurt Union outright or took on observer status. France reluctantly accepted Britain’s reorientation to Germany, laying the foundations for a future trilateral agreement.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time.

Chapter XIII: Political Evolutions, the Matter of India and the Triple Alliance, 1945-1947.​

The Anglo-German Alliance was not affected by political evolutions within the two countries, as the internal politics of the countries seemed to be headed in opposite directions. After the 1943 UK general elections, the Tories remained the largest party but lost their majority to a Labour-Liberal coalition and wound up in the opposition, with Clement Attlee as the new Prime Minister. In 1947, Labour won an even greater victory and could rule without needing the Liberals as a coalition partner any longer. Among other things Attlee’s two successive cabinets made the 40-hour workweek the new standard, raised the school leaving age from fourteen to sixteen, improved access to tertiary education, nationalized key industries like coal, steel and oil and created a National Health Service. In its foreign policy it remained committed to its alliances with Germany and France whilst also aspiring to friendly relations with the still isolationist United States. China, the USSR and to a lesser extent Japan were treated with varying degrees of distrust.

As far as the Empire was concerned, the increasingly strong demand for change in India was the primary topic on the agenda. Negotiations had foundered because Indian leaders like Gandhi, Patel, Ambedkar, Nehru, Bose and Jinah wanted independence – even though they might not agree what that ought to look like – while the British wanted to stay in charge in some form. In response a renewed campaign of civil disobedience emerged in the early 40s that couldn’t be ignored and Labour had a different vision of how to handle the matter than the Tories. Under Tory rule, Britain had declared all of the proponents of independence to be dangerous communists. Alongside an operation to systematically lock up the dissident leaders, a media campaign painted the independence movement as a revolutionary movement that would impose independence under a communist tyranny on the Stalinist model whereas under much more benign British rule independence would also be achieved, albeit at some vague undefined point in the distant future. This was simply not true (except for Bose, who’d become a full-fledged communist at this point) and the attempt to create a Red Scare was unsuccessful. Attlee was of the opinion that repression would just radicalize the independence movement and drive them into the arms of the admittedly still small communist movement in India, which clandestinely distributed virulent anti-British propaganda. He feared the result would be a self-fulfilling prophecy: a communist revolution in India (Bose was training paramilitary forces for it in the Soviet Union).

During his time in office, Attlee tried to find a solution for India and brokered a compromise that didn’t fully satisfy anyone: the Government of India Act 1947, which was still an improvement over its predecessor. The federalization proposed in the preceding Government of India Act 1935 was now finally enacted over the heads of the princely states, much to their ire but also to the mild approval of Indian nationalists. Similarly, an Indian Bill of Rights was passed, despite running into protests from the Princely States. The rulers of these nominally sovereign Princely States were mostly bought off with more land, titles and income. Bicameralism was expanded from the six provinces that already had it (Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Bihar, Assam and the United Provinces) to the remaining five. The bicameral Imperial Legislative Council consisted of members nominated by the Viceroy and elected members. The number of elected members was increased and the requirements to vote were relaxed, doubling the size of the electorate to 70 million people.

Germany had become a constitutional monarchy with a government composed of a centre left SPD-Centre Party-DDP-FDP coalition in 1939. It mostly ruled through parliamentary procedure although sometimes faced by the young, assertive, ambitious, and energetic Emperor. As far as the Junkers and the industrial barons were concerned he didn’t intervene nearly far enough. The SPD dominated coalition had introduced a 40-hour workweek like in Britain, improved the education system and transformed Bismarck’s system of social insurances into a functioning welfare state. Besides all of this, the restoration of the rights of everyone disaffected by the Nazi regime, the Jews in particular, was a major topic. The full citizenship of the Jews was reinstated and properties seized by the Nazis were returned to them or, if that wasn’t possible, they were reimbursed instead. The nationalist-conservative DNVP was sceptical of this and the neo-Nazi NSU was downright hostile.

The coalition stayed in power after the German federal elections of 1943 as the SPD gained even more ground, winning 35% of the popular vote after its popular labour and welfare reforms. Tensions, however, emerged within the coalition as the SPD became overbearing. The social-democrats shifted to the left as their position of strength improved and they started to make proposals that were anathema to their partners. Such propositions included secularization of the education system (opposed by the Catholic Centre Party) and nationalization of petroleum, coal, steel, heavy industry, electricity, aviation and automobile production (opposed by the liberal DDP and FDP, left-liberal and right-liberal respectively). These frictions caused the coalition to implode in August 1945, resulting in new elections in October that year.

A surprising player in the 1945 elections was the DCVP, a successor to the national-conservative DNVP. After the fall of Hitler 1939, the party had been reconstituted and had participated in the elections of that year and won 8% of the vote, similar to the elections of the late 20s and early 30s. The result was much the same in the 1943 German federal elections, much to the disappointment of both wings in the party: the pragmatic wing most closely associated with industrial interests and farmers from the western part of Germany who were prepared to work inside the system within certain limits if only to safeguard their own interests, and the right wing closely associated with the rural areas of East Elbia, especially the Junkers (landed nobility) and the anti-democratic Pan-German League.

The staunchly conservative, nationalist and monarchist wing started to lose its position in the party as their course didn’t produce electoral results whereas it became clear that parliamentarism was the only viable option. Emperor Louis I had shown no signs that he supported a return to authoritarianism as he let the Reichstag do its job. The DNVP moderated its profile by accepting parliamentary democracy as the new Emperor did so too, a sign the times were changing. Their main goal, restoration of the monarchy, had already been realized and they reluctantly accepted the fact that it was a constitutional monarchy.

Besides the fact that the Emperor worked with rather than against the Reichstag and aspired to consensus, the speed with which the SPD’s leftist agenda was enacted alarmed the conservatives. SPD proposals included secularizing the education system, increasing taxes on the rich, imposing new property taxes and land value taxes on landowners, introducing a minimum wage and unionizing rural workers. This would cost the Junkers and industry money as well as eroding their power base and their social standing. Electoral success and a rightist coalition was the only solution, so the DNVP had to be made appealing to more voters. As they moderated to a more centrist party, they went a step further: like the Centre Party obtained much of the Catholic vote, the DNVP hoped to become a catch-all party attracting most of the Protestant vote. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP, German National People’s Party) changed its name to Deutsch-Christliche Volkspartei (DCVP, German Christian People’s Party).

The DCVP combined socially conservative Protestant positions with laissez-faire, anti-tax economic policies and reducing the welfare state to avoid “welfare parasitism”. As a compromise to the side-lined ultraconservative wing, a candidate from the east of the Elbe became the new face of the party: former Mayor of Leipzig Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, an opponent of the Nazis and opposed to some of the anti-Jewish policies they’d enacted. Though opposed to persecution, he did feel Jews shouldn’t have “excessive influence in the government, the economy and the cultural sector” and that position helped steal votes from the neo-Nazi NSU. His anti-Nazi stance nonetheless ensured the party’s respectability as opposed to putting Alfred Hugenberg back in charge again, a man who had collaborated with Hitler. In disagreement with the party’s new course Hugenberg left and founded the Nationalkonservative Partei (NKP, National Conservative Party), which openly aspired to restoring the power of the monarchy, the military and the aristocracy to pre-1918 levels and reducing the Reichstag to an advisory organ.

In the 1945 German federal election, the SPD defended its taxation plans to “squeeze the rich” as necessary to fund a welfare state capable of taking care of German citizens “from the cradle to the grave.” The DCVP criticized further expansion of the social insurance system, or welfare state, as too costly and feared it would encourage “parasites” to abuse the system that was already too generous in their eyes. They favoured increased defence spending instead to live up to Germany’s obligations to its British ally. The SPD also defended its plan to secularize the education system as religion was a private matter and teaching it wasn’t a good use of tax money. The DCVP retorted that Christian values were a part of German identity and that the education system should safeguard their continued existence. The DCVP particularly sought the middle class vote through a campaign that their taxes would be spent on people too lazy to work who’d rather live off benefits. The SPD was also criticized by the communist KPD, which didn’t consider the SPD’s successes so far nor its plans for the future to go far enough. The KPD accused the SPD of collaborating with the capitalists, giving capitalism a “social face, a humane appearance” whilst fundamentally the system and status quo stayed the same and the proletariat remained enslaved. Socialism was further away than ever and the KPD reiterated their pre-1933 accusation that the social-democrats were “social fascists.”

The elections were held on Sunday October 21st 1945 and over the next few days the results showed the SPD had won 28% of the vote, enough for 140 of the 500 seats of the Reichstag. That was seven percent points less than two years prior, and the SPD became the second largest party in the Reichstag. The KPD took part of the votes the SPD lost and jumped from 9% to 11%. The Centre Party practically stayed stable at 12%, the right-liberal FDP dropped to 4%, the left-liberal DDP dropped to 3%, the neo-Nazi NSU was gutted with only 6%, and Hugenberg’s new NKP won just 1% of the vote and went from zero to five seats. The DCVP (formerly DNVP) enjoyed the greatest electoral success in its entire existence until now by obtaining 29% of the popular vote, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag. A centre right government based on a DCVP-Centre Party-FDP-DDP-BVP coalition was formed that represented 50.5% of the vote (the BVP was the Bayerische Volkspartei, the conservative Catholic Bavarian People’s Party). In terms of foreign policy, Chancellor Goerdeler’s government maintained the alliance with Britain.

Meanwhile, France was not the shining example of political continuity, but communist provocations by the communist PCF ordered by Moscow didn’t destabilize it. Strikes and protests in defence of workers’ rights had the effect that the working class was taken seriously and it won the PCF their sympathy, but a wave of strikes devolving into revolution didn’t develop. The PCF rejected instructions from the Comintern, the international Soviet-controlled organization advocating world communism, to stage a coup d’état to ignite either a revolution or a civil war like had happened in Spain. The first reason the PCF didn’t try was because the military was dominated by a largely conservative officers corps that would help the government crush an attempted revolution. Secondly, communist provocations threatened to alienate it from the SFIO, threatening to make it a pariah rather than exercising to the benefit of the working class through electoral means. Thirdly, if a civil war did happen then it was likely that Germany and Italy would intervene and perhaps they’d redraw the borders in their favour in that case.

Moscow was displeased and uttered accusations of “defeatism”, of “collaboration with the social-fascists of the SFIO” and of a “bourgeois nationalist course”. This caused a rift. The centrist coalition the SFIO had joined fell, followed by a centre-right government that lasted until 1944. After that the SFIO and the PCF revived the Popular Front and implemented reforms similar to those in Britain and the SPD-led German governments, resulting in a “welfare state”. In joining a leftist coalition the PCF ignored instructions to regard the SFIO as an enemy (which showed Moscow had learned little from pitting the KPD against the SPD rather than the Nazis before 1933). The rift became a split, which in turn caused a handful of communist members of parliament to break off from the PCF and form the Parti Marxiste-Léniniste de France (the PMLF, a splinter party and Soviet sock puppet that made a lot of noise but achieved little if anything).

Léon Blum had served as Prime Minister in the centrist coalition from 1940 to 1942 and continued in that role in the renewed Popular Front from 1944 onward, presiding over his fourth ministry and also taking the portfolio of Foreign Minister in it. In his role as head of government and foreign minister both the British and German ambassadors presented official proposals to him to form a mutual Anglo-French-German defence agreement, formalizing the status quo: France was already allied to Britain and, due to the Anglo-German Alliance, indirectly to Germany as well. In 1944, thirty years after the Great War had begun (though the memory of 1870 was fading away) this was still a sensitive topic and the anti-militarist Popular Front was reluctant to sign on. During a visit to Paris British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and German Foreign Minister Konrad Adenauer, however, pointed out that France’s borders would be more secure and therefore require less militarization. Besides that, a tripartite defensive pact would discourage other major powers from acts of aggression and likely maintain peace.

In June 1945, Chancellor Hans Vogel, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and French Prime Minister Blum met in Strasbourg and created the Triple Alliance (not to be confused with the Triple Alliance of 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy). Its provisions were practically the same as those of the Anglo-German Alliance that it replaced, meaning all signatories had to declare war if one was attacked by a third party. The French called it the “all for one, one for all” principle (based on Dumas’s musketeers novels of the 19th century). The so-called “Big Three” constituted a formidable force that could provide the League of Nations with the necessary teeth to enforce peace globally. It was denounced as an “imperialist alliance” by the Soviets.

France joined the customs union created by Britain and Germany with the Frankfurt Agreement not long thereafter, creating a powerful economic bloc as well. In the mid-40s Germany, Britain and France were the third, fourth and fifth economies and controlled 8.7%, 7.1% and 4.6% of the global economy for a total of 20.4% (28.7% if Britain’s and France’s colonies were counted, with the British Empire representing 7.1% and the French colonies 1.2%). The United States controlled 19.9% of the global economy, the USSR 8.9%, China 8%, Japan 4.2% and Italy 3.5%. Purely in terms of GDP the Frankfurt Union trade bloc was rivalled only by the United States and had more than twice the economic weight of the Soviet Union.

While the United States had built military power of its corresponding to its size, the USSR could punch above its weight because its economy was almost completely focused on heavy industry and military production. Both were formidable competitors. With Soviet support, China was developing into a respectable regional power with a fast growing economy and a developing armaments industry capable of reproducing Soviet weapons designs. Japan threatened to be eclipsed, both economically and militarily, in the longer term and its powerbrokers struggled to see a way for Japan to stay dominant in Asia. Italy, as the smallest of the great powers, had little opportunity of establishing a great colonial empire and could only prey on smaller powers if the opportunity presented itself. Until then Rome had to content itself with being the largest power in the Mediterranean. With the United States remaining committed to isolationism, the position of the three leading powers of Europe seemed secure.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time!!!

Chapter XIV: Partitioning the Balkans, 1947.​

Stalin may have been the leader of the world’s largest communist country, but in his foreign policy the Red Tsar pursued traditional Russian objectives. In January 1947, Soviet battleship Sovetsky Soyuz and battlecruiser Kronshtadt with a supporting force of heavy cruisers, light cruisers and destroyers steamed into the Gulf of Finland to intimidate the Finnish government. The naval exercises were complemented by Red Army exercises in north-western Russia involving nearly 1 million men. On Monday January 20th, Helsinki had been presented with demands to cede territory based on the Soviet Union’s distrust of Germany, which motivated them to “advance to meet the enemy, rather than wait passively behind the border.”

The USSR demanded that the border on the Karelian Isthmus be moved westward to a point only 30 km east of Viipuri (Vyborg), the demolition of all existing Finnish fortifications there, the cession of islands in the Finnish Gulf, the cession of the Rybachy Peninsula and a thirty year lease of the Hanko Peninsula so the Soviets could establish a naval base there. In return, the Soviets would cede the Repola and Porajärvi municipalities from Eastern Karelia, an area twice the size of the territory demanded from Finland. The Finns realized a fight against an invasion force outnumbering their army 3:1 with major seaborne support was hopeless, especially without any foreign backing. Finland caved to all of Moscow’s demands, which pleasured Stalin’s sadistic side and soothed his paranoid fear of a seaborne invasion. This was an easy victory, securing the border in the northwest permanently as another agreement was reached: Finland wouldn’t challenge Soviet foreign policy in return for its independence and keeping its own political system, coining the term Finlandization.

Meanwhile, Il Duce was frustrated as his ambitions to turn the Mediterranean Sea into an Italian lake couldn’t be realized. Mussolini’s support for the Nationalist faction in the Spanish Civil War hadn’t led to Spain being allied, but to a puppet state in charge of the Balearic Islands and the annexation of Spain’s minor colonies in Africa and the Canary Islands by Italy. Aside from that, Great Britain remained a powerful force in the Mediterranean that prevented Italy from acting against neighbouring Greece. Though the Little Entente no longer existed, Italy also didn’t actively take steps to partition Yugoslavia for fear of the French response if they attacked unilaterally. Just about the only country Italy could annex without a fuss was Albania, but there was no point to it since it was already a de facto protectorate. Mussolini wanted Rome to rule the Mediterranean again and dominate the Balkans, but how could Italy displace Anglo-French influence in the eastern Mediterranean? It couldn’t, unless Britain and France were distracted somehow. That distraction was soon to come.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world high level secret talks had been concluded between Moscow and Rome concerning a division of the Balkans into mutually exclusive spheres of influence. In March 1946, Soviet ambassador Nikolai Gorelkin had taken the initiative on Stalin’s orders to approach Mussolini and float the idea of such a formal division, which he did during an appointment in Il Duce’s office in the Palazzo Venezia, the Sala del Mappamondo. Mussolini had been highly surprised with the Soviet ambassador’s request for a formal audience, but had granted it out of curiosity to see what he had to say. He was quickly enamoured by the idea despite hating communism, but as an opportunist he was easily able to compartmentalize his dislike of the Soviet Union and his desire to create a New Roman Empire. He operated under the logic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The Soviet offer to divide the Balkans was much more interesting to Mussolini than what Britain and France had to offer. This fitted his ego better as separate British and French attempts to keep Italy onboard with the free West, unaware of Soviet shenanigans, tried to convince him to exert influence through soft power. It also didn’t help that Germany saw Italian dominance in the Balkans as a better defence against communist penetration of the region. Meanwhile, if Mussolini could satisfy his desire for grandiose direct Italian rule, he would do it. As the opportunist he was, even the price of being temporarily allied to Moscow was acceptable. This partnership would simply be discarded once it had outlived its purpose. He fully expected London and Paris to accept the end result as a fait accompli rather than making the same mistake as they had after his war in Abyssinia by driving him into the arms of the enemy. Stalin, on the other hand, counted on a rift between Italy and the other Western powers at the very least.

The months that followed were spent haggling over the details until a deal was finally hashed out in September 1946, which Mussolini called an “early Christmas present”. Yugoslavia would be part of the Italian sphere of influence and Italy would settle its territorial claims against it through force of arms in due time. Italy intended to ally with Hungary and Bulgaria to get the job done, the job being partitioning Yugoslavia and leaving only a Serbian rump state. Neighbouring Romania would be part of the Soviet sphere of influence, with the intention to annex Bessarabia, which had been part of Russia until 1918. There was no disagreement at all concerning Yugoslavia and Romania. Besides that, the Italians also agreed to non-intervention if the Soviets tried to settle the traditional Russian claim over the Bosporus militarily.

Serious disagreement, however, existed between Moscow and Rome concerning Greece and Bulgaria. Mussolini wanted to make Greece an Italian satellite state, annex the Ionian Islands and establish naval and military bases in the Aegean Sea. He didn’t want to give up Bulgaria for it since this country would play such an important role in the plans to partition Yugoslavia. Similarly, the Soviets needed both Greece and Bulgaria to play a major part in the upcoming confrontation with Turkey. A somewhat convoluted agreement was reached. The Soviets would allow Italy to recruit Bulgaria for its planned war against Yugoslavia and encourage it to participate, but Italy wouldn’t oppose the Soviet plan to pressure the Bulgarians into allowing Soviet military bases on their territory. Similarly, Greece would be part of the Italian sphere of influence, but Italy would permit Moscow to draw the Greeks into the Soviet claim over the Bosporus. After Yugoslavia was partitioned, Serbia would be maintained as a neutral buffer state between the Italian and Soviet spheres of influence. This would be realized in 1947 as part of a cascade of crises the West would struggle to respond to appropriately as they would have to deal with a country that they thought favoured them, Italy, colluding with their geopolitical rival.

The disbanded Little Entente was no longer in place as a form of collective security. It had been disbanded almost a decade ago after France’s failure to act immediately upon German aggression, which now left the Balkans unprotected against Soviet and Italian aggression. Nine years later it would become clear that Stalin’s long term goal of sabotaging the collective security policy of the West had been successful. After all, every single one of his targets were isolated. They were low hanging fruit, ripe for the picking. No one knows how things would’ve unfolded if the West had consistently followed a policy of confrontation instead of appeasement versus Hitler. Quite possibly, Stalin would’ve been deterred too, but we’ll never be completely sure. As things stood, France’s view of its former Little Entente allies had become rather dim and there was little enthusiasm about going to war to save them as long as the Soviets remained locked up in the Black Sea. Stalin was aware of this, and believed his next move to be risk free.

France’s attitude seemed to rub off on the British and Germans: a long, bloody, grinding war over some medium powers who had abandoned their alliance to the West wasn’t worth it as the balance of power wouldn’t shift if the Straits remained Turkish. What was going to happen would worry the West, ruffle feathers and they’d sometimes reconsider stopping Stalin the Balkans. They were too divided for war, but would protest and enact diplomatic and economic sanctions. What Stalin did to Finland, Romania and Bulgaria in the spring and summer of 1947 resulted in the eviction of his ambassadors in Berlin, Paris and London as persona non grata, a reduction of trade with the three powers and higher tariffs against the Soviet Union. These things didn’t impress Stalin, but instead proved to him right that his move had been a safe one: the West wouldn’t act if their interests weren’t directly threatened and maybe it was still possible to divide them.

Three months after Finland had been cowed into ceding territory, Romania received the same treatment. The Kiev and Odessa military districts mobilized and carried out threatening military exercises that appeared to be preparations for an invasion. Off the coast battleship Sovetskaya Ukraina, battlecruiser Sevastopol and a flotilla of supporting cruisers and destroyers carried out naval exercises in the Black Sea. King Carol II of Romania, who ruled the country as a royal dictator, was no longer a strongman as the prospect of Soviet invasion left him quaking in his boots. After the Soviet ambassador presented him with a note listing Moscow’s demands on Monday March 3rd 1947, he held a cabinet meeting that resulted in Romania caving to Moscow’s demands the same day. Those demands were as follows: ceding Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, allowing the establishment of a Red Army base on the Danube, permitting a Soviet naval presence stationed in the major port city of Constanța, and signing a mutual defence agreement. In return the Soviets promised to respect Romania’s independence and its political system, like Finland’s example. It was a positively enviable position compared to what was about to happen to neighbouring Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was faced by a mounting internal crisis starting in the autumn of 1946 as the fascist, Croatian ultranationalist, ultraconservative and pro-Catholic Ustaše movement had begun an insurgency against the Yugoslav regime to fight for independence, supported by Italian agents-provocateurs. Using the mountainous terrain and supplied by a continuous stream of Italian weapons and ammunitions, the Ustaše engaged the Royal Yugoslav Army effectively in a guerrilla war and established zones free from Yugoslav rule. In these zones, Croats were safe and so were Bosniaks as they were simply regarded as Muslim Croats, but Jews and ethnic Serbians were massacred. Serb dominated units of the Royal Yugoslav Army committed massacres of their own against Croats. Croatian protests and strikes in the major cities were met by tanks and bullets, resulting in virtual street battles won by the government army. Only Zagreb was held by the Ustaše, resulting in orders for the Royal Yugoslav Air Force’s to bomb the city. While the Ustaše took control of the countryside, the Yugoslav regime remained in control of the cities and stayed in control by enforcing martial law there. The world became aware of acts of ethnic cleansing from both sides, though particularly those committed by the Royal Yugoslav Army as Italy broadly meted them out. Italy in particular objected to the alleged ill treatment of the Italian minority of Yugoslavia and also advocated Croatian independence. The Yugoslav regime pressed forward nonetheless and the country descended into a state of virtual war by the spring of 1947.

On March 10th, only one week after Romania had been bullied into accepting Soviet domination, Mussolini made his first move in the Balkans with an ultimatum delivered by his ambassador in Belgrade. Rome’s ultimatum declared that the government of Yugoslavia was no longer able to guarantee the security of its Italian minority and had never respected its right to self-determination to begin with. In dignified but clear wordings this document said only Italy could ensure the safety, prosperity and happiness of its countrymen separated from their country by nothing more or less than a wrong border, that went back to the “mutilated victory” of 1918. Firstly, the ultimatum demanded the cession of Dalmatia to Italy, even though ethnic Italians constituted only a few percent of the total population of the region. To strengthen his historical claim, Mussolini’s ultimatum pointed out Dalmatia had been under Venetian rule from 1420 to 1797. The second demand was the cession of Kosovo so the ethnic Albanians there could be united with their kinsmen in Albania. The third demand concerned an autonomous status for Croatia within Yugoslavia. Very quickly Hungary issued an ultimatum for the cession of Baranya and northern Vojvodina, both areas with Hungarian minorities, while Bulgaria laid claim on Vardar Macedonia. Belgrade got 24 hours to reply.

No answer other than a stubborn refusal to cave to Italian demands had been received by Rome by March 11th, the day the ultimatum expired, as Belgrade considered them outrageous and tantamount to a partition. The die was cast, Yugoslavia prepared for war to deter the Italians or, if that failed, to fight them. Given what happened next, it would’ve been better if they had accepted the demands because the peace deal they got from what has become known as the Third Balkan War was even worse. The Third Balkan War began the day after the ultimatum expired on Wednesday January 12th with a massive Italian air attack on Belgrade, followed by an invasion.

Yugoslavia could mobilize 30 infantry divisions, six armoured divisions and 40 independent brigades for a total of 1.25 million men, but much of its equipment dated back to the Great War and was therefore about thirty years old (the exception were the tank divisions, which had modern tanks of French design). The air force had about 600 front-line aircraft of domestic, British, French, German and Italian origin, most of which were fairly modern types like the IK-3 Rogožarski, the Bf 109 and Hawker Hurricane fighters as well as Do 17, Bristol Blenheim and SM.79 bombers. The Royal Yugoslav Navy had an obsolete ex-German light cruiser, one large modern destroyer flotilla leader, three French designed destroyers, one seaplane tender, four modern submarines, ten motor torpedo boats, six ex-Austrian Navy medium torpedo boats, six mine-layers, four large armoured river monitors and various auxiliary craft.

The Regio Esercito mobilized 1.7 million men in 75 divisions, the Regia Aeronautica had 3.800 aircraft, and the Regia Marina was a blue water navy with eight battleships, two aircraft cruisers, 23 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 80 torpedo boats and 130 submarines. This force was able to impose a naval blockade that the small Royal Yugoslav Navy couldn’t break. Hungary committed its Second and Third Armies, or about 150.000 men while Bulgaria committed a force over twice that size and Albania managed to summon up two divisions.

The conclusion of the Third Balkan War was almost foregone as the three powers arrayed against Yugoslavia fielded roughly 2.2 million men, giving them a numerical superiority of almost 2:1. The Regio Esercito invaded from the northwest through Slovenia, but the advance was arduous and slow due to the tough mountainous terrain, stubborn resistance from the Yugoslav army and Slovenian partisans attack Italian supply lines. The advance continued nonetheless and was complemented by an amphibious operation in Dalmatia that landed three attack divisions under the cover fire of battleship guns. The beachhead swelled and ultimately fifteen divisions had made landfall, whilst occupying the entire Dalmatia region and forming a threat to the Yugoslav rear. The Italians opened yet another front in the south by attacking from Albania in the south to take Kosovo. The Hungarian offensive from the north, the Bulgarian offensive into Macedonia and the increasingly effective partisan war by the Ustaše drew away forces sorely needed to fight the main enemy. The Ustaše also seriously meddled with the supply lines to the north-western front.

After six weeks of fighting the Italians had taken Sarajevo and Kosovo, the Hungarians were standing on the Danube and the Bulgarians were all over Macedonia. What remained was a Serb national redoubt and it was clear that it would be a matter of time before that last bulwark of obstinate, pugnacious defiance would fall. The Serb dominated Yugoslav government reviewed the situation and reluctantly decided to count its losses and surrender so at least the Serb homeland could be preserved. That was indeed all that was left as the Treaty of Fiume put an end to Yugoslavia as a united South Slav state after it was signed in June 1947: Italy annexed Slovenia and Dalmatia; an Italian protectorate was established over Montenegro, which saw its monarchy restored; Croatia became an independent kingdom with Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, reigning under the name Tomislav II; the Serbs living in the new Kingdom of Croatia, which included Bosnia-Herzegovina, would be given the choice to stay or leave in theory, but in practice the Ustaše expelled them; Hungary annexed northern Vojvodina and Baranya, Bulgaria took Vardar Macedonia and Albania got Kosovo; the Serbian rump state that remained was forced to change its name back to Kingdom of Serbia.

For one of the victors of the Third Balkan War, Bulgaria, its moment of glory was short-lived as a part of the secret agreement between Rome and Moscow was set into motion. Using the presence of the Red Army in Romania and its naval forces in the Black Sea, the Kremlin intimidated Bulgaria into allowing a Soviet military base on its soil near Plovdiv and a naval base at Varna. Soviet influence over Bulgaria was penultimate piece of the puzzle in their Balkans strategy aimed at gaining some kind of hold over the Turkish Straits. Despite Bulgarian pleas Rome did nothing, honouring its agreement with Moscow.

The final step was getting Greece onboard to unite against the Turks together with the Soviet Union and Bulgaria, but the Soviets had managed to pull it off. This had proven difficult as the 76 year-old Prime Minister of Greece Ioannis Metaxas, being anti-communist, distrusted the Soviets (as well as the Bulgarians). Greece would be cooperating with the USSR (and its Bulgarian ally) if the proposals of the Soviet ambassador in Athens were to be believed. They would jointly pressure Turkey to cede East Thrace to Bulgaria and Smyrna to Greece whilst Istanbul and the Turkish Straits would become an international zone jointly administrated by the three in the name of the League of Nations.

The Soviets guaranteed that Western Thrace would remain Greek as they would not support Bulgarian claims over it, which didn’t convince Metaxas as he’d witnessed what had happened to Romania and Bulgaria. His confidence was slightly elevated by Mussolini applauding a Greek move against Turkey with the Bulgarians and the Soviets and declaring to be in favour of maintaining Greece’s current borders plus what it could get from Turkey. He knew Mussolini to be anti-communist, so he’d oppose a Soviet move on Greece. Metaxas, however, hadn’t forgotten that there had been Italo-Greek tensions in the past and knew Italy had territorial ambitions in the Balkans as well. Metaxas, however, was being heavily pressured by nationalist elements to go along with it as such an opportunity to realize Greek territorial claims – over which a war had been fought between 1919 and 1922 – might never come again. He trusted that the British would come to his aid if the Italians broke their word and tried to make a move on Greece. He was being played.

 

[Onkel Willie]

This is becoming a soviet wank. The part about the modernization of the red army was not only unbelievable but actually impossible (Russia simply did not have the ability to equip the tanks with wireless) and now you have all of Western Europe asleep.

I edited the part about the radios. As to Western Europe sleeping, there going to wake up soon because it's update time once again,.

Chapter XV: The Turkish Straits Crisis, the Second Purge, Thailand and Iran, 1947-1951.​

Stalin’s next move took place in the summer of 1947 and the playbook used to cow Finland, Romania and Bulgaria into submission was put into action again. Soviet forces based in Bulgaria were mobilized, as were Red Army divisions stationed in the Caucasus near the Turkish border. Bulgaria and Greece carried out mobilizations of their own, intending to realize their respective territorial claims on East Thrace, the Turkish Straits, Istanbul and Smyrna, temporarily setting aside their differences. Italy half-heartedly sided with them on the matter, but didn’t want war at all and considered anything it would get from the crisis as a bonus. The battle group centred on battleship Sovetskaya Ukraina steamed south and carried out aggressive naval manoeuvres just outside Turkish national waters, less than one hundred kilometres north of Istanbul.

Ismet Inönü, the President of Turkey, realized there was a clear and present danger of a two-pronged attack from east and west by the Soviet Union, Italy, Bulgaria and Greece. He considered giving in if the demands weren’t outrageous to avoid a war he was likely to lose. He knew the Turkish army was mediocre and couldn’t hold off the Red Army. It quickly became clear, however, that Turkey’s enemies wanted much more than the Turks were willing to concede. That pushed them to stand their ground despite knowing that however valiantly they fought, they’d lose. Letting themselves be humiliated this much was unacceptable, and if Turkey caved even greater and more unacceptable concessions would probably be demanded anyway. Given the strategic importance of the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles), there was more than a good chance that the other great powers would become involved.

A delegation composed of the Soviet, Italian, Greek and Bulgarian ambassadors presented their demands to President Inönü on Wednesday June 18th 1947. The Soviet Union demanded the right to establish a naval base in the proximity of the Bosporus. Additionally, the Soviets asserted that a territory stretching southwest from Georgia to Giresun (including Lazistan) had been stolen from Georgia by the Turks under the Ottoman Empire. Based on their “historical” legitimization the Soviets claimed this Turkish land, hoping to expand their influence in the Black Sea and the Middle East. Italy wanted a concession for a naval base in Antalya province, Greece wanted Smyrna and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and Bulgaria wanted East Thrace. Since nobody could agree who ought to control the Bosporus, the Dardanelles and Istanbul (or Constantinople, as the Greeks insisted with their Byzantine revival ambitions), the four powers demanded the area be put under international control with a League of Nations appointed “High Commissioner”.

Turkey’s rejection of these demands, its subsequent mobilization and the threat posed to the balance of power raised the interest of the Anglo-French-German Triple Alliance powers. It was the first test of this alliance, established in 1945, and it seemed to pass its baptism of fire by acting determined and in unison with Britain taking the lead. In line with its historical opposition to a Russian warm water port on the Bosporus, Great Britain was the first to react to the Soviet move firmly. This was a threat to British dominance in the eastern Mediterranean and this would decidedly not be met with appeasement as the foreign office had learned the hard away that that didn’t work on dictators. Attlee’s government declared Britain would respond militarily in the event that anyone attempted to seize control of the Turkish Straits unilaterally through force of arms. France and Germany supported Britain, carrying out partial mobilizations of their armies. France deployed capital ships to the Aegean Sea in support of Royal Navy battle groups and carrier groups while the Imperial German Navy deployed in strength in the Baltic.

Stalin backed down and agreed to negotiate a diplomatic compromise as he was cautious in nature, refusing to risk a war at this time. He didn’t act on his threats toward Turkey when it became clear that doing so would probably lead to a confrontation with the Western great powers he still wasn’t completely sure the USSR was ready for. The negotiations were hosted by Czechoslovakia in Prague. The Triple Alliance was represented by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, German Chancellor Carl Goerdeler and Prime Minister Léon Blum. They sent a strong signal as all three heads of government of the Triple Alliance powers were present. Mussolini was also present, but the paranoid Stalin would rather not leave his country and sent Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov instead (he had replaced Litvinov, who had been made ambassador to China in 1940). Delegations from Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria were also present.

At the opening day of the conference Molotov addressed the grievances the Soviet Union had concerning the “Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.” The convention dating back to 1936 regulated the passage of warships of non-Black Sea states, but also imposed some limitations on the Black Sea powers themselves. One regulation forbade aircraft carriers from passing through the Bosporus. Another regulation was that only Black Sea powers could transit capital ships (other than aircraft carriers) of any tonnage, but with no more than two destroyer escorts. Molotov said that Moscow wanted these two unfair regulations to go and the Soviets saw a naval base on the Bosporus as the guarantee that Turkey wouldn’t frustrate the free transit of Soviet naval ships. Besides that it reiterated the historicity of its claims on Turkish territory, both the Turkish Straits and their claims on the territories bordering Georgia.

Though their historical claims were shoddy at best, Soviet frustrations about being bottled up and desiring unrestricted access to the world seas were at least somewhat understandable to public opinion, even though the Bolsheviks weren’t well liked by the West. Greece and Bulgaria’s claims only really had historical arguments for them, but the territories they wanted were predominantly inhabited by Turks by 1947. Smyrna, called Izmir by Turkey, was predominantly Turkish and so was the region of East Thrace (Bulgaria later moderated its claims to just Edirne, but it didn’t help that there were more ethnic Greeks and even more Turks in the city than ethnic Bulgarians).

After months of negotiations, the Montreux Convention was replaced by the “Prague Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.” It allowed the Soviet Navy to transit capital ships of any size, including aircraft carriers, without any limit to the size of their escort. The Western powers backed Turkey in opposing a Soviet naval base on the Bosporus and rejected international control of the region. Instead they proposed international supervision by a commission in which representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania would take place and which would have little actual power. Furthermore, Turkey would be allowed to fortify the Turkish Straits to defend against aggression by third parties as they saw fit, de facto allowing them to unilaterally close the Straits by force of arms. The Soviets agreed as their diplomatic efforts to get the much desired Bosporus naval base were met with resolute Western opposition. It was a pyrrhic victory for Moscow: the Straits were now open to anyone, as long as the Turks let them pass.

As to Bulgaria, none of its territorial claims were granted and this cemented the alliance with Soviet Russia that it first saw as forced upon it, but came to regard as necessary if it ever wanted to realize a Greater Bulgaria. Sofia accepted the Soviet presence and expected its support in a future conflict against either the Turks or the Greeks, or maybe both. Thusly the country became a loyal partner in the Balkans for Moscow.

As far as Greece was concerned, its neo-Byzantine claims to Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople (Istanbul) were dismissed as they’d end up controlling a large, resentful Turkish minority if they were indeed granted these territories. Nobody really felt like backing Greece up against uprisings and wars against Turkey to defend their regained territories. Athens did regain the majority Greek islands of Imbros and Tenedos thanks to Italian pressure while Italy also promised its military backing in the event of Bulgarian or Turkish aggression.

Italy came out as a winner too, making gains in Greece. To Greece the drawback of Mussolini’s support was that it was conditional as he was an opportunist. In return for Italy’s backing to gain just two islands in the Aegean Sea and a guarantee against either Bulgarian or Turkish aggression, Rome wanted basing rights and got them after enough pressure. Italy was able to push Greece into a corner on account of the fact that it was on the “wrong side” in the Turkish Straits Crisis as far as the Big Three Western powers (Britain, France and Germany) were concerned. Given their dim view of the Greeks, they weren’t planning to act if Mussolini didn’t demand anything that would shift the balance of power significantly in the eastern Mediterranean. Besides that, to the British and the French the move ostensibly seemed to be a part of an apparent Italo-Greek alliance directed against Turkey and Bulgaria rather than something that was forced on the Greeks. Athens had unintentionally alienated its traditional Anglo-French allies for short term gains, who in response to this affront didn’t help. Moreover, they weren’t too worried as they knew Italy wanted to keep the Soviets out of the Mediterranean just as much as they did, so an Italian naval presence in the Aegean wasn’t that bad. It certainly beat the alternative.

Only now did Metaxas realize how Italy and the Soviet Union had secretly and cleverly manoeuvred to isolate his country. This forced his country to agree to what seemed minor concessions, which in reality forced Greece to defer to Rome in its foreign policy as the rest of the world didn’t see the need to do something about it. Italy outright annexed the Ionian Islands to increase Italian control over the access to the Adriatic Sea. Mussolini referred to it as a purchase since Italy paid Greek the equivalent of $10 million for them (roughly $120 million in 2020), but it was not a real sale as Greece had no choice in the matter and accepted to save face. Secondly, Greece had to accept the establishment of an Italian naval base on Salamis Island and a second one at Souda Bay on Crete.

The Western powers were brimming with confidence after the Turkish Straits Crisis had been resolved. After all, they had managed to force Stalin to back down and give up demands for Soviet control of the Bosporus, thereby avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s by confronting a dictator threatening war instead of appeasing him (the nuance was that Stalin had never intended to go to war with the West over the Turkish Straits, while Hitler in 1938 was hell bent on war no matter what they did). With this matter dealt with, Britain, Germany and France continued with their plans to intensify European economic cooperation. In a summit in October 1947, the Frankfurt Union was renamed the European Economic Union and free travel between member states was agreed upon. The Netherlands, Luxembourg as well as Denmark had joined in 1946 and Sweden and Belgium, both observer states, now became full members to be able to export to its neighbours, all of them member states, without facing tariffs. Norway joined in 1948 while Poland and Portugal followed one year later. The European Economic Union was on the verge of becoming the world’s leading economic bloc.

Stalin wanted to prevent an encirclement began orchestrating tensions in Asia in early 1949, two years after the Turkish Straits Crisis, to keep China on his side and because what he had planned was low risk and unlikely to draw as much as attention as his failed Turkish gambit. He pressed ahead in Asia in close cooperation with the President of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who had no love for either the Japanese or the Western colonial powers. Ridding the country completely of colonial influence could only be done with Soviet support. The first step was to send the super dreadnought battleships Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya – escorted by two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and a dozen destroyers – on a global tour to make “friendly courtesy visits.” After visits to Cartagena, Naples and Salamis, the Soviet ships went through the Suez Canal and only stopped for fuel until they reached Bangkok.

The Soviet flotilla arrived at a moment that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs T.V. Soong was in the Thai capital to talk to its Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, also colloquially known as Marshal P. He led the country as a nationalist military dictatorship. Thailand, also known as Siam, had lost significant territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the colonial empires of Britain and France surrounding them to the west, south and east. With an impressive symbol of Soviet power floating in the Bay of Bangkok, knowing the USSR backed China, the Thai regime was interested in Chinese proposals. In May 1949, the Sino-Thai Treaty of Friendship was signed that mainly concerned itself with greater economic cooperation, issues of territorial integrity and sovereignty, as well as coordination in foreign policies.

A secret protocol dictated that if China removed colonial rule from Southeast Asia, then Thailand would support it and regain Laos and Cambodia in return. Thailand would also allow Chinese forces to pass through its territory to Burma and Malaya and provide reinforcements. In order for Thailand to deliver a credible military performance, if the time ever came, the Royal Thai Army was beefed up as part of the deal. The obsolete T-26 and BT series tanks had been donated to China to form tank divisions, but after a few years they began license produced version of the T-34 (the older T-26s, BT-5s and BT-7s were mothballed). China sold 300 of them to Thailand to form two tank divisions while license produced Yak-3 fighters and Il-10 ground attack aircraft were sold to replace the obsolete aircraft Thai pilots were flying with. Chinese trainers improved the quality of the Royal Thai Army.

After the deal was done, Stalin’s ships moved to the Formosa Straits and ruffled feathers in Tokyo, though they worried more about long term implications than short term ones as they had five Yamato-class battleships, each one superior to the Sovetsky Soyuz-class (besides that, they had a class in development that would have even bigger guns, 51 cm/20.1 inch guns, but that was still a carefully guarded secret). What became known as the “Great Red Fleet” visited Qingdao in China and then went on the long trip home, rounding Cape Horn and making a few brief stops for fuel before returning to Arkhangelsk.

The Great Red Fleet returned to a country once again gripped by a purge as Stalin felt the need to get rid of people who had, in his view, become too comfortable in their positions as they’d held them for too long, which might in turn encourage them to conspire against him. Longstanding comrades, or rather henchmen, who had loyally carried out his bloody will for years as willing executioners and were knee-deep in blood, suddenly saw themselves falling out of favour with their fervour in the Great Purge being used against them.

In the summer of 1950, the NKVD fabricated a plot called the “Anti-Revolutionary Reactionary Fascist Monarchist all-Russian Restoration League”. The trials dominated the headlines for much of the autumn and winter of 1950 while the purge itself continued until 1952. The goals of this fictional opposition was to assassinate Stalin, overthrow the communist party and restore the monarchy and capitalism under a nationalist Russian fascist regime. Exactly as had happened in the Moscow Trials of the late 30s, the accused confessed to a litany of crimes and begged for the death penalty after psychological pressure and torture. Formerly prominent figures like Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Budyonny, Voroshilov and slightly lesser figures like Khrushchev, Bulganin, Andreyev, Voznesensky and dozens of others were sentenced to death and shot. Budyonny faced his execution with courage as he refused a blindfold and insisted the men of the firing squad looked him in the eyes as they took aim. He recanted his earlier confession, professing his loyalty to Stalin with his last words. Beria, on the other hand, begged and pleaded for his life and resisted so much that taking him out into the courtyard of Lubyanka was too much trouble. He was shot in his cell instead by an officer putting two 7.62x25 mm rounds in his head with his Tokarev pistol. As a sadist Stalin found Beria’s behaviour before death funny and sometimes mockingly mimicked him, illustrating his sometimes macabre sense of humour.

The politburo was almost completely wiped out and staffed with completely new cronies. This purge wasn’t of the same scale as the Great Purge with a quarter of a million executed (rather than 700.000) and a total of half a million deaths resulting from incarceration in the gulag. The officers corps was spared as Stalin remembered the disastrous effect this had had on the Red Army’s performance, but all the Generals and Marshals were tightly monitored by their political officers to make sure none of them had any “Bonapartist tendencies.”

In 1951, Stalin also made his first serious move in the Middle East by cultivating relations with Iran, led by a young, ambitious and progressive Shah. The young Mohammad Reza Shah had no love for communists at all, but he had reasons to resent the British because they exerted so much control over his country’s oil production. After the latest renegotiation in 1933 during the reign of his father Reza Shah, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company still held 260.000 square kilometres and their new concession was to last sixty years. It required AIOC to make payments in lieu of income tax with a minimum of £750.000. These provisions, while appearing favourable, are widely agreed to have represented an unfair deal for the Iranian government. The agreement extended the life of the D'Arcy concession by an additional 32 years, negligently allowed AIOC to select the best 260.000 square kilometres, the minimum guaranteed royalty was far too modest, and in a fit of carelessness the company’s operations were exempted from import or customs duties. Finally, Iran surrendered its right to annul the agreement, and settled on a complex and tediously elaborate arbitration process to settle any disagreements that would arise. Under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah, AIOC had promised to give labourers better pay and more chance for advancement, and build schools, hospitals, roads and telephone lines. AIOC did not fulfil these promises and this caused discontent. After his father died in 1947, aged 69, the angered 28 year-old Shah resolved to undo these mistakes at the earliest opportunity. He appointed a Prime Minister who agreed with him in the shape of Mohammad Mossadegh.

The fairly young Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 42 years old at the time, went to Iran on his first real mission in his new role in November 1951 after rising through the ranks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat (first serving as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s principal European ally, from 1941 to 1949). During his visit to Teheran, Gromyko signed the Soviet-Iranian Treaty of Friendship, which concerned economic cooperation and mutual assurances of each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, reaffirming the 1921 friendship treaty. A secret protocol dictated that Moscow would support Iran’s intention to nationalize its oil. In reality, Iran waited for a major Soviet move to distract the West so it could finally take the oil and drive the British out once and for all. It was unclear if and when that would happen, but Mohammad Reza Shah would take the opportunity if it did.

The young Shah believed he would get his chance very soon, but the British were confident of their dominion over their informal empire in the Middle East. During an arbitration procedure started by the Iranians to demand a higher minimum royalty, the Royal Navy’s Lion-class battleship HMS Conqueror made courtesy visit to Bushehr before continuing its journey toward Singapore. It was a clear message to everyone that the British Empire was more alive than ever and was not to be trifled with, a message that was received with frustration by the Shah and others who wanted to throw off the British yoke. Like it or not, Britain saw Iran as part of a cordon to contain the Soviets. Soon, however, the Empire was to be in peril as the world faced its greatest humanitarian disaster yet.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time.

Chapter XVI: Heart Attacks, Strokes and Wheelchair Bound Dreams of a Red Empire, 1951-1953.​

In the latter half of the 40s Stalin’s health had begun to deteriorate, perhaps not surprising given his lifestyle. After years of heavy drinking, chain smoking cigarettes and his distrust of doctors it’s surprising he lived as long as he did. As early as 1945, he had been forced to take a two-month vacation in the latter half of the year due to heart problems. He feared that that senior party figures might try to take advantage of his health issues by ganging up on him and forcing his resignation on grounds of “ill health” and then isolating him like he himself had done to Lenin, or worse. Bugging the apartments of his underlings and demoting some of them hadn’t assuaged these fears and ultimately culminated in the Second Purge. His distrust of doctors ultimately resulted in the final trial of the Second Purge, after one of his doctors had foolishly suggested he should retire to improve his health. Several Kremlin doctors were arrested on accusations of planning to assassinate senior figures in the party and government through poisoning, were tortured into confessing, and were ultimately sentenced to death or long prison sentences in the gulag system. With the Doctors’ Trial in February 1950, the purge came to an end after six months of frenzied bloodshed.

Stalin’s health continued to deteriorate, making him increasingly unpredictable and bad tempered, which made him more rude and insulting than before with more angry outbursts. This tough-talking attitude came to overshadow his charm, joke cracking and penchant for practical jokes. He had had three minor strokes between 1948 and 1950, but he didn’t take time off as suggested because his working life and private life, as modern biographers have suggested, were “one and the same.” The strokes didn’t diminish his complex mind, great self-control, excellent memory, keenness to learn and drive to work hard. He continued to patronize the arts and voraciously read up to 500 pages a day from his personal library of 20.000 books, which primarily consisted of non-fiction history books mostly concerning Russian, Mesopotamian, ancient Roman, and Byzantine history, though Stalin could also quote the bible and Bismarck.

What the strokes did do was increase Stalin’s paranoia and temper. Instead of being confident in his position after he’d “cleaned house” by eliminating all his established henchmen, his paranoia stayed at the same feverishly high level of the Second Purge even after it was done. With everyone scared out of their minds and walking on egg shells around him while mid-level party members were just settling into place, there was no obvious domestic target for him to go after (other than minorities). His distrust was redirected towards the Triple Alliance powers, i.e. Britain, Germany and France. These bourgeois capitalist states had set their imperialist rivalries aside which in Stalin’s interpretation could only mean one thing: they had united against the USSR to pre-emptively crush it.

This was compounded by Stalin’s latest stroke on March 1st 1953. During the evening of February 28th Suslov, Brezhnev, Kruglov, Gromyko, Abakumov, Saburov, Pervukhin and several others who’d risen through the ranks thanks to the purges, in some cases by testifying against their former bosses, gathered at Stalin’s Kuntsevo dacha for an evening of entertainment and drinking. After a movie, informal talks and an improvised opera that demonstrated Stalin’s singing voice, the guests dispersed around 04.00 AM on March 1st while Stalin retired to his private quarters and left strict instructions not to disturb him until sounds could be heard that indicated he was awake. The boss usually woke up around 11.00 AM, but an hour and a half later no sounds had been heard. His head of security Nikolai Vlasik dared to enter the room at 12:45 PM and found him lying next to the sofa he’d slept on, still wearing his pyjamas and with a dark spot of dried up urine underneath him. Doctors were rushed in and they hospitalized him, treating him with blood thinners. Stalin survived, but was left in a wheelchair.

The fact that Stalin was left wheelchair bound had no effect on his power, and he went to work again after a sickbed of only three weeks and with some new medications. He remained as feared as ever and his newest cronies didn’t dare to act in any other way than to try and save him. All of them feared Stalin would recover if they tried to seize power in his absence and punish them later, and they seemed to be right. The boss’s intellectual abilities and memory remained largely intact, but his judgment became compromised as his rationality couldn’t override his paranoia anymore. It made him imprudent.

This paranoia was firstly directed toward certain minorities: as Stalin continued to irrationally insist that the German government had attempted to assassinate him, despite lack of proof, the NKVD carried out Stalin’s orders to deport the entire Volga German minority. All 370.000 of them were sent to nickel mines north of the Arctic Circle, iron mines in the Urals and forced labour camps in Central Asia. One fifth of them died during transport or after arrival due to deprivation, illness and cold while a handful escaped to India.

He also distrusted the Jews and deported all Soviet Jews to the Far East. He concentrated them in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which effectively became a gulag for Jews as they weren’t allowed to leave and were subjected to forced labour. Leaders of the Jewish community were arrested and either exiled or executed by the thousands. Soviet ambassador to China Maxim Litvinov, the USSR’s former Jewish Foreign Minister, became a dissident: he disobeyed an order to return home as he expected to be arrested and executed due to the anti-Semitic persecution his former master had unleashed. Litvinov fled to Hong Kong and applied for political asylum in Britain.

This left Stalin’s heightened (unjustified) paranoia toward the West. He had hoped to sow division among the Western powers and had once had particularly high hopes of a communist revolution or civil war in France. Instead an Anglo-German-French axis had formed that had organized the European Economic Union, which Stalin saw as an instrument to turn the smaller European countries into satellites in an orbit around the Big Three. He was adamant that Berlin, Paris and London were arraying all of capitalist Europe against the USSR for a preventive attack that could only be stopped if the Soviet Union pre-empted it with a strike of its own. We now know that no actual plans for a war of aggression against the Soviets existed anywhere in the West as historians have searched in Western archives and found no evidence of this, but to Stalin the threat was real.

His first order of business on the first workday after his stroke, Monday March 23rd, was to have a meeting with Stavka in his Kremlin office. He explained to his staff that he possessed secret intelligence gathered by the NKVD that indicated an invasion of the Soviet Union was being planned by the West. The Western proletariat were too “indoctrinated” and plied with concessions in the shape of a “welfare state” to rise up and prevent their countries from attacking the USSR, their last best hope of a workers’ paradise. The only possible conclusion was that the Soviet Union had to strike pre-emptively against the bourgeois fascist powers and he ordered his generals to plan an invasion on a European scale, which would strike two birds with one stone: eliminating the Western threat and exporting the revolution. A number of his generals doubted the intelligence and others were sceptical of the Red Army’s abilities to do this despite the advancements of the Red Army of the last decade, but during the meeting they kept their doubts to themselves to avoid being accused of defeatism later. Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack on May 1st, but his generals later persuaded him June 1st would be better to avoid the worst of the rasputitsa.

Stavka went to work and developed Operation Nevsky, named after a medieval Russian icon famed for his victories over German invaders. Operation Nevsky wasn’t so much a detailed invasion plan that would lead the Red Army to the objective of reaching the English Channel in a matter of a few months, but instead focused on defeating Germany. Soviet commanders operated under the correct assumption that Germany had the strongest army and largest industrial base of the three major Western powers. So if Germany was defeated, then they would have no real way to drive the Red Army back from the Rhine. They would then have to accept Soviet terms or fight on in an exhausting war, with the Red Army building up in Germany to deal the final blow. The war could last anywhere between months to a year or two they believed. Either way, Stalin’s Red Empire would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific if the war was won. Stalin had every confidence that it would because the alternative was unthinkable. The commander he appointed, tank general Georgy Zhukov, had his work cut out for him.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the war begins...

Chapter XVII: Operation Nevsky, June-July 1953.​

The war would soon begin, but of course a believable casus belli was needed to sell the war to domestic audiences and motivate them to fight. Engineering such an incident or crisis for this purpose wasn’t that difficult as the Soviet people would believe it given that they only had access to state controlled media and not to foreign news outlets. That Western audiences wouldn’t accept the public Soviet rationale to go to war, never mind the secret one, was of secondary concern. After all, a victorious Red Army would soon make all of them accept the Soviet view, or at least that was the plan.

In April 1953, the Soviet Union declared it wanted to renegotiate the its border with Poland as the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in eastern Poland belonged with their ethnic brethren living in the USSR. Moscow proposed moving border all the way to the Curzon Line as five million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Byelorussians lived east of it out of a total of twelve million people (ignoring the 4 million Poles and 1.4 million Jews). Moving the border that far west would have cost Poland more than a third of its territory and Stalin realized the Poles would never agree to this.

Poland had no intention of surrendering even a square centimetre of its soil, a response that Stalin had fully expected, and its allies supported it: Britain, France and even Germany had agreed to ally with Poland a few years prior. They had become confident after containing the Soviets during the Turkish Straits Crisis and were confident they could make him back down again. They chose confrontation instead of appeasement, which met criticisms at the time, though we now know at this point it didn’t matter as Stalin intended to go to war no matter what they did. This time the peace could not be saved.

To justify themselves, the Soviets began printing articles and pamphlets with vivid, detailed descriptions of alleged Polish atrocities against the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in Eastern Poland while cinema newsreels showed fake material concerning these same made up atrocities. Soviet media depicted the Poles as virtual demons that impaled babies on pitchforks or burnt them alive and raped women. Whilst ethnic minorities were not exactly treated equally to ethnic Poles and were discriminated against, Warsaw could in all honesty deny these ludicrous accusations made in venomous Soviet propaganda. This material was of course meant for domestic consumption more than anything else.

Poland carried out a full mobilization of its army to deter the Soviets and the Red Army mobilized in response, prompting a partial German mobilization too although no-one expected a full-blown invasion of Poland or any kind of fighting at all. A lull in all the rhetoric made it seem the Soviets would back off again and come to the negotiating table, resulting in minor concessions at the most. This, however, was a smoke screen. It was the silence before the storm as the build-up for Operation Nevsky continued in the utmost secrecy as Stalin couldn’t be persuaded to cancel it. The maskirovka campaign was so successful at masking the Red Army’s build-up that Western intelligence agencies had no idea what was coming.

After being postponed due to the weather, Operation Nevsky was finally unleashed on Sunday June 14th 1953 and it was the largest military operation the world had ever seen. It involved 6 million men, 12.500 armoured vehicles, 75.000 artillery pieces and 15.000 aircraft. Another 2.5 million men, organized in two fronts, were held in reserve but close to the front to be provide reinforcements and millions more were still mobilizing or deployed in the defence of the Soviet Union’s other borders. The attack began at 04:00 AM when the people living in eastern Poland woke up to the gargantuan roar of tens of thousands of Soviet artillery guns and Katyusha rocket launchers firing simultaneously. Witnesses described how the night was lit up by nightmarish flashes of explosions and how it seemed like the entire planet seemed to be shaking.

Despite the Polish Army’s preparedness, as it was fully mobilized, the artillery bombardment had a devastating effect on Poland’s defences. The vast numerical superiority of the Red Army finished the job: the Poles were outnumbered 8:1 as four Soviet fronts bore down on them, while they had to deploy half of their million man army to contain the advance of the Czechoslovakian Army into Poland from the south. The 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts advanced to the north of the Pripet Marshes and threatened to surround more than 200.000 Polish soldiers, but they withdrew to the Bug River. The advance of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts was similarly successful in the south, driving Polish defending forces back to the river San and conquering much of Galicia in a joint operation with Czechoslovak forces. Driving the Poles to the Bug-San line had taken only two weeks. On a tactical level there were Polish successes as they used their 21TP, a license produced version of the newest version of the Panzer IV with a high-velocity 75 mm gun, which proved to be able to deal with the T-34. There were just too many T-34s unfortunately.

Germany issued immediately issued a declaration of war as, to the north of the Polish theatre, East Prussia was also under attack from the Red Army too (this unprovoked attack on Germany in turn prompted Great Britain and France to declare war on the USSR immediately). The 1st Byelorussian Front invaded with 1 million men, but fortunately the territory wasn’t undefended as Germany had carried out a partial mobilization in Poland’s support. As part of this mobilization, the Army High Command (OKH) had decided to deploy forces to the part of Germany that was the most vulnerable in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union: East Prussia, an exclave as it was separated from the rest of Germany by a narrow corridor of Polish territory that connected Poland to the Baltic Sea. The German Eighth and Ninth Armies had been deployed in defence.

The German defenders were outnumbered 2:1, but they valiantly held their ground as long as they could because it quickly became clear what happened to civilians that were left to the tender mercies of the Red Army, first from Polish reports and then from German refugees fleeing to the safety of German lines ahead of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers pillaged, torched towns, executed civilians and raped women. German soldiers therefore didn’t retreat until there was no other option, but military logic unfortunately dictated that German forces in East Prussia eventually would have to conduct a strategic withdrawal to avoid being obliterated.

After five weeks of intense combat, German control over East Prussia had been reduced to a coastal sliver that the OKH estimated could only hold out for one more week, ten days at the most. The Imperial German Navy deployed in force to evacuate all German soldiers and as many civilians as they possibly could. The 2nd Battle Squadron – consisting of Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst – was deployed to provide suppressive fire with its 38 cm (15 inch) and 28 cm (11 inch) guns to keep the Red Army at a distance. Germany’s aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin and light carriers Seydlitz and Lützow provided air cover to the operation as floating airbases. The 1st Battle Squadron – consisting of battleships Kaiser Wilhelm and Prinz Heinrich, and fast battleships Mackensen and Prinz Eitel Friedrich – steamed toward the Finnish Gulf to face the Soviet Baltic Fleet should it decide to take to the seas in force.

The Germans seized all suitable civilian and merchant vessels to get as many troops and civilians as possible out through Königsberg and Marienburg. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise ship, managed to transport more than 10.000 people to the safety of Germany’s largest Baltic port, Rostock. This was more than six times the number of passengers that she’d been originally designed for, and she completed the trip for a total of eight times, rescuing 80.000 people. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy contributed to the operation with four capital ships to provide gunfire support: HMS Lion, HMS Temeraire, HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. They had a large destroyer escort and these ships with their 35+ knot top speed were used to rapidly ferry out German soldiers and civilians.

The British also sent confiscated civilian vessels, most of which were cargo ships, but several available cruise ships were also used: most prominently RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Caledonia (formerly the RMS Majestic). The latter had been commissioned by Germany in 1914 as the SS Bismarck, but had been ceded to Britain as a reparation in 1920. The Royal Navy had acquired the Majestic from Cunard-White Star Line in 1937 and renamed her to HMS Caledonia, using her as a training ship. Before the war broke out in 1953 she’d been mothballed and slated for scrapping, but the war saved her from the scrapheap.

The two Queens each evacuated 9.000 people at a time, making the roundtrip between Königsberg and Rostock five times. The Caledonia was slightly slower and on July 22nd was still at sea, carrying 2.500 Wehrmacht soldiers and 4.500 civilians, while the two Queens had already completed their fifth roundtrip. Unfortunately, Soviet submarine S-7 had penetrated the destroyer screen and was able to fire three torpedoes at the Caledonia at 07:00 PM before a destroyer caught on and forced her into an emergency dive. The cruise ship had nowhere near enough lifeboats for so many people and stalled for time by closing the watertight doors, hoping naval ships in the vicinity would respond to her SOS calls. Forty minutes into her sinking her list to starboard became so severe the lifeboats on the portside couldn’t be lowered into the water. Her propulsion was stopped and a general abandon ship order was issued by her captain, forcing thousands of people to get into the water with nothing but a life jacket or a lifebuoy. Thousands more couldn’t get out of the ship in time due to enormous overcrowding. There were three-and-a-half times more people onboard than the ship was designed for and throngs of panicking people crowded in front of the staircases and elevators, with many people being crushed in the stampede. Many of them were still stuck in the ship as she disappeared beneath the waves.

Out of the 7.000 people on board, 4.000 died due to the initial explosions, in the stampede, because they were still in the ship after she went under or due to burning oil, making the “Sinking of the HMS Caledonia” the worst maritime disaster in history. Those at sea were lucky that the Baltic Sea’s water temperature in the summer was a balmy 15-20 ºC and most of them were therefore saved by naval vessels responding to the Caledonia’s distress calls. Her wreck, located 35 kilometres east of the Danish island of Bornholm, is now considered a war grave.

The sinking was depicted in an epic, award winning war movie released in 1990 starring Sean Connery. The film, named Caledonia, is considered a classic and one of the best war movies ever made while also being one of the longest films to make it to the cinema (182 minutes in its theatrical run, while the director’s cut is 217 minutes). Connery won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as captain Henry Jones and Bill Paxton won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his depiction of German Wehrmacht Major Hermann Heinz leading a ragtag band of soldiers and civilians out of the ship. Steven Berkoff, who played the captain of the Soviet submarine, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor too but lost to Paxton. In reviews Berkoff was called “an excellent villain.” The family of Captain Vasily Orlov (who had passed away in 1986) considered the heavily fictionalized version of him in the movie libellous and tried to sue, but lost as the judge considered the liberties the creators had taken to be “artistic freedom.”

In the meantime, the war continued. On Saturday July 25th 1953 the last German forces left East Prussia and the hammer and sickle flag flew over the old Prussian capital of Königsberg. About 350.000 soldiers had been evacuated and lived to fight another day and roughly 1 million civilians had been rescued over a period of slightly more than five weeks in an arguably herculean effort. Around 200.000 more escaped westward through privately owned cars. East Prussia, however, had a population of 2.2 million and more than 1 million of them couldn’t run fast enough to escape the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of women aged between 13 and 70 were raped by Red Army soldiers, often multiple times or by several men at once (some women escaped multiple rape or group rape by dating Soviet officers). This continued until strict orders were imposed that punished rape with a standard ten year gulag sentence. The alternative wasn’t much better, but stopped the mass rapes of German civilian women going on. A system of army operated brothels was created which recruited women known to be prostitutes before the war. It also recruited from women’s prisons in the occupied territories in return for freedom and in the USSR among women who’d rather do this than stay in the gulag. As this wasn’t enough, young women were kidnapped in police roundups and made dependent on opium to make them work in the brothels.

The reason to stop the mass rapes going on was that the communist German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in Königsberg with Wilhelm Pieck as its President and Walter Ulbricht as its Premier (this prompted a split in the KPD between a pro-Soviet and a pro-German faction). The Germans couldn’t be converted to communism if the Red Army kept behaving like a ravenous beast. Germany had to become the heart of a Red Europe as the German Revolution of 1918-’19 had intended, but only in lockstep with Moscow. Stalin would have a united communist party as a junior partner, not as an equal.

To the south, Poland was on the verge of being overrun after about five weeks of combat. The Polish Army had been pushed back to the natural defences provided by the Bug and San rivers in two weeks. During this fighting retreat to their new defensive line the Poles incurred heavy casualties, which was the price for their courageous resistance against a superior enemy. Germany’s rapid mobilization briefly stabilized the situation as a force of thirty divisions, roughly 450.000 men, was deployed to the front on the Bug River in defence of Warsaw. With all the bridges destroyed, the Polish and German defenders on the Bug’s left bank kept the invaders at bay from June 28th to July 2nd. On July 3rd, the Red Army established multiple beachheads on the left bank of the Bug supplied by pontoon bridges. Polish-German attempts to crush them failed.

The Battle of Warsaw was about to begin. The Red Army reached the Vistula River and the outskirts of Warsaw only one week after crossing the Bug, facing the prepared and motivated garrison defending the city. Ignoring German advice to declare Warsaw an open city to avoid its destruction as well as unnecessary civilian and military losses, Poland’s commanding officer Field Marshal Sikorski left his country’s capital with 150.000 defenders. Between July 3rd and 5th the city was encircled and cut off from the outside world, dooming the defences despite the costly attempts by their allies to save them. Poland would be gone in a few more weeks.

 

[Onkel Willie]

To answer some of the questions above: nuclear weapons will be seen later in the war as they've not been developed yet as there was no urgent reason to do so, same for other technologies that got accelerated by WW2. As to Italy, Mussolini is of course waiting for the right moment to jump in. But right now it's time for Poland to fall.

Chapter XVIII: The Fall of Warsaw and Assault on the Ostwall, July-August 1953.​

A rescue attempt to Warsaw was about to be mounted. Germany quickly and efficiently transitioned from a partial to a full mobilization and the Imperial German Army’s frontline strength in Poland increased to 100 divisions, or approximately 1.5 million men, in less than four weeks’ time. The hastily planned counteroffensive to relieve the besieged city of Warsaw, codenamed Operation Summer Solstice, involved 250.000 German troops and another 100.000 Polish forces as well as 1.500 tanks and 8.000 artillery guns. In the hopes of making this a success after weeks of fighting retreat at best, or running at worst, the Germans used the most advanced weapons and tactics they had to offset their enemy’s massive numerical superiority.

Part of Germany’s tank divisions now used the older Panzer IVs and others the newer Panzer V “Panther”. After most of the design flaws had been dealt with by early ’44, the Panther entered mass production that year. It was decidedly superior to the T-34 and started replacing the Panzer IV, though they were kept in reserve and now used again. The Panther combined the latest high-velocity 75 mm gun that possessed great punching power with slanted armour that was inspired by the T-34 but significantly thicker, whilst having a top speed roughly equal to the much lighter Soviet tank: the nearly 45 tonne main German tank and the 26.5 tonne Soviet workhorse could both reach nearly 55 km/h. Elite tank divisions solely equipped with the Panther were deployed for Operation Summer Solstice (the latest generation Panzer IV had the same high-velocity gun, but thinner and non-slanted armour, weighing 25 tonnes).

The Imperial German Air Force also chipped in whilst the tanks rushed into the enemy. To achieve local air superiority, the Germans deployed an existing aircraft design in a completely new role: the Junkers Ju 252 had originally been designed as a transport aircraft and airliner. As radar technology was successfully miniaturized, the designers had installed it on a Ju 252 years prior and had successfully demonstrated the very first “airborne early warning aircraft” in existence. The officers witnessing the demonstration were intrigued and adopted this novel type of aircraft. Using radio, these AEW aircraft could warn their own side of incoming Soviet aircraft long before they could be spotted either visually or by ground based radar. They vectored a revolutionary type of fighter aircraft to intercept Soviet fighter and bomber formations: the very first operational jetfighter, the Heinkel He 280, appeared on the battlefield. After years of terribly slow development, because piston-engine designed seemed to suffice, the first squadrons with He 280 jets entered service months before the war to phase out the turboprop fighters. With a top speed of 900 km/h, sometimes reaching the speed of sound in dives, they ran circles around Soviet Yak-3 turboprop fighter planes.

The German-Polish relief force concentrated to the southwest of the city and on July 6th attacked what reconnaissance flights had identified as a weak spot in the Soviet frontline. A brief but intense artillery bombardment poked some holes and an armoured spearhead of German Panthers opened up a corridor to the city. German fighter squadrons, including the new jetfighter squadrons, maintained air superiority over the corridor by intercepting Soviet formations based on the intel provided by the Ju 252 AEW aircraft. Though the operation was intended to extract the besieged defenders, some supplies were sent into the city too.

After hours of stubborn refusal, wasting precious time, the Poles finally agreed to completely evacuate Warsaw through the corridor toward Lodz. In the 48 hours that the corridor was open, 50.000 Polish troops fought their way out of the city. The remaining 100.000 Polish defenders stuck inside after the breach was undone by the Red Army fought valiantly. An airlift briefly managed to supply them with ammunitions, fuel and food for a few more days through safe aerial corridors created with AEW aircraft, but the airborne aid was cut off as the front moved further west and Poland’s allies were confronted by more pressing concerns. A quarter of a million artillery shells and rockets combined with aerial bombardment annihilated the city, forcing the remaining garrison and civilians underground. They re-emerged when the Red Army advanced into the city, engaging the defenders in intense urban combat over the ruins. The last pockets of resistance in Warsaw surrendered more than three weeks later on July 25th. Warsaw had fallen and Stalin planned for Germany to follow.

German Chief of Staff Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had decided that confronting the numerically superior Soviets out in the open on completely flat terrain between the Vistula and Oder rivers would be foolish as it played into the enemy’s strength. The Germans would open themselves up to enormous pincer moves and subsequent cauldron battles, which were likely to result in major defeats with severe losses even if German forces broke their encirclement and managed to withdraw. Polish generals were displeased when Manstein told them that for these reasons the Imperial German Army would tactically retreat to the so-called Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen or Ostwall (East Wall). German forces withdrew from Polish soil to this defensive line they had built in the years before the war. The Poles were free to go down in a blaze of glory, but the Germans wouldn’t join them in that fate. Polish forces regrouped on German soil, hoping to liberate their fatherland sooner rather than later. It would be much, much later.

German commanders had confidence in the Ostwall as this was one of the most technologically advanced systems of fortifications and in size exceeded the Maginot Line. The Germans had had over fifteen years to complete it, so this was no surprise. It had a depth of up to 25 kilometres and consisted of over 6.000 pillboxes, 400 casemates, 90 shelters, 20 observatories, 150 larger forts with heavy artillery, one hundred retractable turrets with 75 mm high-velocity guns, eighty machine gun turrets with 13 mm heavy MG 131 machine guns, barbed wire fields, minefields, anti-tank ditches, Czech hedgehog anti-tank obstacles and lines of so called “dragon’s teeth” armoured concrete anti-tank obstacles. The most powerful defences were six triple turrets with 28 cm (11 inch) battleship guns mounted on land, each of which had a maximum range of forty kilometres. The line was largely interconnected with tunnels and this underground tunnel system contained railway stations, workshops, engine rooms, power stations, ammunition storages, barracks, hospitals, and even some bars and cinemas for the garrisons to use during their off-time. This was the world’s largest and most modern contiguous line of fortifications and it would soon face the world’s most massive army. An unstoppable force was about to hit an immovable object.

The Red Army began its assault on the Ostwall, after a pause of no more than 72 hours, on Saturday July 11th 1953. After reservists and new recruits replenished the losses incurred thus far, the Red Army attacked with 6 million men and thousands of tanks, artillery guns and aircraft. The two fronts still held in reserve constituting 2.5 million men, the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts, were released and went on trains to the Oder frontline. The line was manned by only 2 million German soldiers, but they were well protected in their heavily armed fortifications made from thick armoured concrete. Moreover, the Ostwall was well designed with openings that appeared as weak spots, but which in reality were traps designed to lure attackers into kill zones. The line functioned as its designers had intended, inflicting between two to three times more losses on the attackers than the defenders incurred in the Red Army’s initial frontal attacks.

The Soviets brought siege guns to bear. The line’s advanced design meant its garrison was able to hold off a significantly larger attacking force, but not indefinitely and not if sufficient firepower was arrayed against it. More than two thousand B-4 203 mm howitzers, nicknamed “Stalin’s sledgehammers”, were deployed to deal with the smaller blockhouses and casemates. The less numerous Br-5 280 mm mortar was used in a similar role. The Czech arms manufacturer Skoda had designed the Br-17 210 mm heavy siege gun and the Br-18 305 mm superheavy siege howitzer, which were both used against the larger fortresses. Five 38 cm (15 inch) railway guns were also deployed, using guns originally intended for the cancelled Kronshtadt-class battlecruisers. Incessant attacks with Katyusha rocket launchers were used to psychologically drain the German defenders, relying on the constant howling sound.

Germany’s Anglo-French allies had mobilized and it came as a relief that their forces were coming into play in this crisis situation. The alternative to breaking the Ostwall was to circumvent it via Czechoslovakia, but the OKH had predicted that move and had left fifteen divisions in place to deal with a Czechoslovak move. Forty fresh French divisions replaced these as they were redeployed to the Ostwall and the French stymied an actual Czechoslovak offensive after it had advanced a few kilometres across the border. The French then pushed them back across it and established some toeholds in the Sudetenland, but were stopped by the powerful Czechoslovak border defences thanks to Soviet backup.

In the meantime, General Bernard Montgomery flew to Hamburg ahead of the first elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Montgomery had fought in the Great War, in the Irish War of Independence, and then served in India. In 1938 he organized an amphibious combined operations landing exercise that impressed Sir Archibald Wavell, the new Commander-in-Chief of Southern Command, earning him a promotion to Major General. He would have fought in the Sudeten War commanding the 8th Infantry Division, but that war had ended before any British forces could reach the front and instead he commanded his division during the suppression of the 1936-’39 Arab Revolt in Palestine. He continued to rise through the ranks under Wavell’s tutelage, briefly serving in India again in 1946-’47 to control the unrest there before the Government of India Act 1947 was passed, receiving a promotion to Lieutenant General. He was subsequently earmarked to command a British corps sized force to land at Gallipoli to aid the Turks if the Soviets tried to seize the Bosporus and the Dardanelles by force during the Turkish Straits Crisis. He was made a full General two years later.

The units of the British Expeditionary Force weren’t sent to the front piecemeal as they arrived despite German requests for them, but were concentrated until they’d grown into a credible force that could independently defend a sector on the front. Montgomery didn’t want British units taking orders from German generals even though Britain and Germany were on the same side now. On June 16th, two days after Great Britain’s declaration of war, the first elements of the BEF embarked and they arrived in Hamburg two days later. Four weeks later, around July 14th, I Corps, II Corps and a number of independent units had been deployed, for a total of about fifteen divisions. Together they constituted a force of roughly 225.000 men and 30.000 vehicles, supplied with 125.000 tonnes of ammunitions, fuel and food stocks.

The first breaches in the Ostwall were punched by Soviet heavy artillery and Il-10 bombers carrying armour piercing bombs modified from 38 cm (15 inch) shells. The gaps were attacked by tanks divisions supported by infantry, which could now outflank German defenders and attack them in the rear and thusly gain control of larger parts of the Ostwall. The Germans counterattacked with their own tanks stationed behind the Ostwall precisely to smother a Soviet breakthrough of their fortress line. Ju 252 airborne early warning aircraft were used to vector in enough fighters to achieve local air superiority, but after a while that tactic didn’t work anymore. The Soviets deployed so many aircraft that they overwhelmed the German defenders, despite their effective use of their new and superior jetfighter. The Red Army breached the line at more and more places despite the Germans’ best efforts to stop them, even when the Soviets got in range of the 28 cm turrets, due to numerical superiority. The turrets were eventually either bombed into submission or sabotaged as their German garrisons abandoned them. After two weeks of combat, the line was considered compromised and the Germans withdrew across the Oder River, blowing up the bridges behind them. The collapse of the Ostwall left many Germans living in Posen and Silesia under Soviet occupation. The German army had suffered severe losses as the Soviets attempted to stop their withdrawal with offensives all over the front. Many Germans became POWs, though they later learnt they were better off fighting their way to safety or die trying due to the poor Soviet treatment of prisoners.

The next phase would see the invasion of the German heartland and the capture of Berlin, which Stalin believed would demoralize Germany to the point that it’d seek terms. The opening moves showed it wouldn’t be easy for the Red Army, hinting that the German government wasn’t about to roll over. The German commander chosen by Manstein to lead the Ostwall now also commanded the new defensive line along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Walther Model, who had retired in 1951, had been recalled despite his earlier Nazi leanings and proved an excellent defensive tactician with a tenacious fighting style. He intended to make things as difficult as possible for his Soviet opponents.

The prelude to the Fall of Berlin was the Oder-Neisse Offensive. Most of the fighting took place at the Seelow Heights, the last high point before completely flat terrain all the way to Berlin. Model had anticipated the Soviet attack and had covered the Seelow Heights with trenches, bunkers, anti-tank obstacles and landmines. He didn’t just employ fortifications, but also deception as he had his men build dummy positions to distract enemy artillery and airpower or lure enemy attackers into ambushes in the marshy terrain leading up to the Seelow Heights. The Soviets concentrated the 1st through 3rd Byelorussian Fronts, totalling more than 3.5 million men, for the attack while Model had the Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army at his disposal. It took the Red Army eleven days to take the Seelow Heights despite a numerical superiority of more than 3:1. By that time, Soviet forces had crossed the Neisse to the south while crossing the Oder to the north near Stettin as well. Three major bridgeheads on the Oder-Neisse Line had been established by the end of the Battle of Seelow Heights on August 5th. The Soviets had suffered serious losses, but the Germans had suffered terrible losses and too and had much smaller manpower reserves to replace them with.

The Battle for Berlin began 24 hours later and armies of a size never seen before would clash. The Red Army tried to stop the Germans and their allies from regrouping, whilst they themselves were reinforced by the arrival of the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts released from reserve. The arrival of these two fronts and multiple corps sized independent units boosted Soviet frontline strength in Europe to 9 million. Whilst the Imperial German Army had a total strength of 8 million men, this wasn’t its frontline strength as this number included all kinds of administrative and supporting personnel as well as lower quality reserve units for patrol and sentry duty. Frontline strength was closer to 6 million. Besides that, Germany also had to maintain a sizeable standing force in Austria just in case Soviet and Czechoslovak forces would launch an offensive to seize Vienna and control of the Danube along with it. The Germans tried to eliminate every non-essential function to free up as many soldiers as possible for frontline duties.

The British and particularly the French tried to provide their ally with sufficient reinforcements. The BEF, now numbering twenty-five divisions, concentrated at Neubrandenburg and bolstered the German left flank, fiercely resisting the vanguard of the 1st Byelorussian Front directly facing it. The determination and professionality of the BEF north of Berlin was outmatched by the impressive size and speed of the French deployment to the south (Charles de Gaulle had overseen the mechanization of the French Army and its change in doctrine over the past few years, enabling its rapid mobilization). French strength in Germany had doubled to eighty divisions, roughly 1.2 million men, by the time the Battle of Berlin began. It was going to be the largest battle the world had ever seen.

 

[Onkel Willie]

@ferdi254 I suppose it has something to do with the USSR having had years to prepare for an invasion and that this is supposed to be a reversed Barbarossa on steroids. Besides that, this invasion into Poland and then Germany is being carried out by a Red Army that wasn't first pushed back to Moscow and Stalingrad and the massive losses in manpower, materiel and production capacity that that cost.

Anyhow, it's time for a fresh update.

Chapter XIX: The Invasion of Germany and Consolidation, August-December 1953.​

The Battle of Berlin began in the early morning hours of Thursday August 6th 1953 as part of a grander plan: the invasion of Germany proper. Zhukov had planned it as a gigantic pincer move inspired both by the classical Battle of Cannae and the 1914 Schlieffen Plan derived from it. His powerful right wing would consist of the 1st through 3rd Byelorussian Fronts and the 1st Ukrainian Front, while the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts formed the centre and the 4th Ukrainian Front and the Czechoslovak First Army constituted the left wing (the left wing also included a brigade sized force of exiled German communists). This amounted to more than 9 million men supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft as well as tens of thousands of artillery guns. Opposing them were the Germans who now had a frontline strength of 5.5 million men despite the gigantic losses suffered thus far, which they couldn’t replace as easily as the Red Army could. The French Expeditionary Force, of which Chief of Staff Marshal Charles de Gaulle had personally taken command, numbered 1.2 million men. The BEF numbered almost 400.000 men.

Zhukov’s opening move was for the left wing commanded by General Ivan Konev to advancing between Cottbus and Dresden. They would feign an attack toward Leipzig and their deployment was to make it clear that they would subsequently swing north toward Magdeburg as part of a move to encircle Berlin. The left wing was the weakest and was instructed to conduct a fighting retreat upon facing a serious counterattack. If the Germans and their allies were fooled into believing this was the main attack as Zhukov intended, their response would be to divert forces south to counter it. The centre commanded by Rokossovsky would merely hold at the Seelow Heights while the powerful right wing under his personal command would launch the coup de grace. His forces would break through the weakened front north of Berlin, encircle the city and take much of Germany east of the river Elbe. It wouldn’t completely go according to plan, but Germany east of the Elbe would fall and then some.

When Konev carried out his diversionary manoeuvre, Manstein saw through it for several reasons. Firstly, a main advance in the south made little sense strategically as it would leave the Baltic coast in German hands, preserving German naval dominance. Secondly, intelligence and photographs obtained through aerial reconnaissance enabled him to roughly estimate the size of the attack, which wasn’t what German generals had expected of the main Soviet effort. Allied forces managed to bring it to a halt with the forces present anyway, many of them French who counterattacked with elan.

The right wing, however, was so gigantic that resistance seemed futile. Two days after the Leipzig-Magdeburg Offensive Operation had failed, the main effort was still unleashed as planned: the Berlin-Elbe Offensive Operation. Four Soviet fronts, totalling 6 million men, were bearing down on the German left flank. Of the 5.5 million German soldiers serving on the front, 3 million constituted the left wing as well as the 400.000 men of the BEF. As they were outnumbered almost 2:1 they couldn’t prevent the Red Army from swarming over north-eastern Germany. Within one week the vanguard of the Soviet right wing reach the bank of the river Elbe near the town of Wittenberge, the site of the notorious Wittenberge Massacre: frustrated by valiant German resistance, Soviet officers executed several thousand German POWs and most of the town’s men aged 18-50 while the women were raped, stores were looted and part of the town was set on fire by Red Army soldiers.

Manstein’s approach to the crisis situation around Berlin was threefold: he took tactical, humanitarian and strategic measures. His tactical approach was quite simply to instruct frontline units to resist for as long as they possibly could, encouraging them to be creative and take the initiative when an opportunity presented itself for a counterattack. Stalling the Soviet advance southward would prevent the encirclement of Berlin in the short term, allowing the Imperial German Army to evacuate the capital’s civilian population. After most civilians were gone, Berlin was subsequently declared an open city to prevent it from being ruined and the Red Army paraded through a virtual ghost town three weeks after the battle had begun. After the fall of Berlin, the maelstrom of the Soviet right wing continued its onslaught and the Allies threatened to be crushed as the left wing now moved to close the pincer. German forces, De Gaulle’s French Expeditionary Force, the BEF and the remnants of the Polish Army had no choice but to strategically retreat west as planned.

The Allies, as the Triple Alliance powers became known, regrouped behind the river Elbe in the northern sector where Hamburg became a frontline city. The Elbe River, which formed the frontline, ran straight through the city and artillery exchanges devastated much of the urban area. Urban fighting by heavily armed infantrymen supported by tanks damaged the city even more as fierce battles took place with the Soviets, holding most of the city, trying to establish beachheads on the left bank of the river while German and British forces fought to push them back. The city’s shipyard’s were ruined. In the central sector of the front the Red Army crossed the Elbe in the closing phase of the invasion, but grinded to a halt roughly 120 kilometres west of Leipzig in the rugged terrain of the Harz highland region where a new Allied defence was organized as well. In Austria, the southernmost and until recently most uneventful theatre, German forces were forced back to the Danube. Vienna suffered much like Hamburg did. The frontline had been reached from which the Allies would not yield.

The Red Army had advanced 1.500 kilometres west, which would turn out to be the maximum extent of the USSR’s westward expansion. The Soviets had conquered an area the size of Western Europe despite heavy losses suffered due to fierce and effective resistance by the Anglo-German-French Allied powers at the end of a very long supply line, which would prove to be the limit of Soviet logistical abilities. Zhukov and Soviet generals knew this, but hadn’t counted on a victory in one campaign to begin with. They weren’t discouraged as they simply expected to finish the job the following year once they’d consolidated their hold over the areas they’d conquered.

Communist regimes on the Stalinist mould were installed in occupied Poland and the conquered parts of Germany. Walter Ulbricht became the leader of the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was what the pro-Moscow communists called themselves after the majority of the KPD sided with the fatherland and rejected the “social-imperial Stalinist brand of communism.” In the newly founded Polish People’s Republic Boleslaw Bierut combined the offices of President of Poland and General Secretary of the party. Neither Ulbricht nor Bierut had real power, but the NKVD did: NKVD liaisons representing their boss Kruglov, the head of Stalin’s secret police and concentration camps system called “the Gulag”, were the power behind the throne. The armies of these new communist government were similarly influenced by the Soviet Union: in Poland, for example, Soviet General Rokossovsky was made Minister of Defence.

After show elections under NKVD supervision in an atmosphere of terror, a campaign of mass persecution began to eliminate all opposition. The intelligentsia, intellectuals, scientists, former officials, civil servants, captured military officers, policemen, clergymen and educators were targeted. About 1.5 million Polish and German nationals were imprisoned, 200.000 officers were summarily executed, half a million others were executed as well, and 3.5 million people were deported to Siberia where roughly half of them died. With a pool of slave labour available, much of the infrastructure demolished by the enemy on the retreat as part of a scorched earth policy was rebuilt. All agricultural land was confiscated, nationalized and redistributed from landowners to rural peasants, which briefly gave the communists some popularity among Polish peasants but failed in Germany. This limited popularity quickly came to an end as the Soviets organised all agricultural land into collective farms and requisitioned food and other goods they needed from them. The exorbitant Soviet quotas made sure the Red Army was well fed, but caused a famine that hit Poland particularly hard: 1 million people perished in the 1953-’54 Polish Famine. An insurgency emerged in Poland as a result of Soviet repression, resulting in brutal crackdowns by the NKVD. The combination of the Polish Famine and brutal Soviet rule cost Poland 2.5 million lives, over 6% of its pre-war population.

German Emperor Louis I chose Frankfurt as his temporary capital for its historical significance, and its more recent role as the birth place of the Anglo-German-French military alliance and trade bloc. There he had the leaders of the five largest parties in the Reichstag sit down and talked them into forming a government of national unity for which they set aside their differences for the common goal of liberating the occupied half of the country east of the Elbe. A war cabinet with representatives from the DCVP, SPD, Centre Party, DDP and FDP was formed. In the post-war years people would speak of the “the spirit of Frankfurt”, which was the turning point during which suspicions and distaste dating back to the Imperial and Weimar years dissolved and the transition to a parliamentary democracy became definitive and irreversible. In the short term the government of national unity did all it could to increase war production. For Germany this was a total war: all non-essential war production was ceased, labour conscription was introduced for women aged 18-55 to take the place of the men, a curfew was enacted and food was rationed. The measures were accepted and differences were put aside, similar to the “Burgfrieden” in the Great War.

Germany’s neighbour and ally France took a similar approach and revived the political truce of the Great War known as the “Union Sacrée” to create solidarity. Communism on the Rhine was an intolerable idea to France and its economy went into total war mode too, albeit supported by its large colonial empire. To neighbouring Britain the war was less acute than it was to Germany and France as the front was distant, with no fighting taking place anywhere near British oil and its full industrial capacity still available to it. It was nonetheless clear how dire the situation was: if Germany collapsed the Red Army would march to the Rhine and it was feared they couldn’t be stopped there, which would result in the Red Threat sitting right across the Channel plotting an invasion. A Labour-Tory-Liberal government of national unity was created. French and British armaments production skyrocketed while more and more divisions mobilized as reservists were called up, volunteers enlisted and the British finally enacted conscription.

Cooperation and coordination between the three powers increased and matters like pride were set aside. The He 280 jetfighter, entered production in France as that would be quickest way to provide the French Air Force with a jetfighter in numbers (the British, in this case, went with the Gloster Meteor that had entered service on the eve of war). France and Britain also jointly designed a tank to replace the mid-40s designs and beat the T-34. As far as the naval theatre went, they faced the Soviet submarine fleet and it was the world’s largest: Britain, Germany and France agreed on a British design for a simple, reliable destroyer that could be produced in serious numbers. In all three cases, of course, joint and shared production maximized weapons output and eased logistics as production of these weapons and their spare parts could be standardized on a European scale. The Allies had to match the colossal size of the Red Army and this was one way of doing that.

During the autumn and winter of 1953-’54 the war remained a stalemate as both sides built up their strength for round two. The frontline ran along the northern part of the Elbe River and then swung south through the eastern outliers of the Harz highland region and in the utmost south of Germany the Danube was held with Vienna as a front city. Allied defences built with a temporary character, as the mobile phase of the war was expected to be resumed soon, started to gain a more and more permanent character. An elaborate system of trenches with machine gun posts, artillery positions, barbed wire entanglements, anti-tank obstacles, anti-tank ditches, bunkers and minefields emerged on the Allied side of the frontline with supporting units behind it to contain breakthroughs. This defensive line reached a depth of 30 kilometres. Soviet defences weren’t nearly as deep, but they fully expected not to need such depth as they intended to attack and a force of tens of thousands of tanks was a potent defence in itself. Allied commanders were quite confident the front that cut Germany in half could be held, but they didn’t know if they could push the invaders back and also didn’t know the war would soon expand to Asia.

 

[Onkel Willie]

The war goes on.

Chapter XX: The War in Asia, the Middle Eastern Theatre and the Siege of Gibraltar, December 1953-July 1954.​

On Monday December 14th 1953, Beijing issued a longwinded ultimatum that listed all the slights China had had to endure over the past one hundred years before proclaiming the end of the “century of humiliation” and moving on to China’s actual demands. The Republic of China demanded that Britain and France returned all the territorial concessions they’d obtained in China through, in the ultimatum’s wording, “extortion through military aggression or threats thereof and unfair economic concessions granted by previous Chinese governments under duress.” The document delivered to the British and French embassies demanded that the two great powers reply affirmatively within 72 hours or “face the vengeance of the Chinese people.”

President of China and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was encouraged by the terrific success of his Soviet ally in the European theatre. The West had been thrown into disarray with the Red Army advancing into Europe like a bull in a china shop, which presented them with a long term military crisis. The British and French couldn’t spare any forces for a serious confrontation with China, but still refused to yield to Chinese demands contrary to the Kuomintang regime’s expectations. Chiang believed they would still cave once push came to shove and was slightly surprised when this didn’t happen, but launched a highly successful military operation after the ultimatum expired. The Battle of Hong Kong became the symbol of China’s resurgence: 75.000 Chinese troops faced a garrison of only 15.000 men and the Crown Colony fell in just three days. The other concessions fell much quicker as their garrisons had been reduced to the bare minimum to send troops to Europe.

Chiang had presented the West with a fait accompli and he believed that would be the end of it as Europe was preoccupied. Contrary to expectations, Great Britain, France and Germany declared war on China as doing nothing in the face of this aggression would send the message that it was alright to take Western colonies. Taking this lying down could sent the message to colonial peoples that their European masters were in a weak position that they could take advantage of to demand concessions or, God forbid, independence.

China now became part of a world war that spanned Eurasia. While Chiang didn’t expect a war with the colonial powers, he was intimidated by the prospect as he knew the British and the French had nothing to back it up with. Opportunistic as he was, he chose to exploit this as best he could by launching a land grab in Southeast Asia. As Europe went into its first Christmas in wartime, the old continent was treated to the news of a Chinese invasion of French Indochina. France had 50.000 troops stationed there, 38.000 of which were colonials and only 12.000 French. On Christmas day 1953, 300.000 troops invaded the northern region of Tonkin and 60.000 Thai troops invaded from the west. Resistance collapsed within three days and French Indochina was partitioned by the victors in the Treaty of Canton. Cambodia and Laos were directly annexed by Thailand while Vietnam became a Chinese satellite state.

In the Chinese city of Kunming in Yunnan Province the exiled Nationalist Party of Vietnam (Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng, VNQDD) led by Vu Hong Khanh proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam on January 1st 1954. It promptly received diplomatic recognition from the USSR, China, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, Iran, Korea, the People’s Republic of Poland, Romania and Serbia. The VNQDD was closely modelled on the Chinese Kuomintang and had assassinated French officials and their collaborators in the past, before launching a mutiny in 1930 in the hopes of igniting a nationwide anti-French revolt. The VNQDD had subsequently been crushed by the French and regrouped in Yunnan Province in China, receiving weapons and training there from KMT ruled China and biding its time. Though it was leftist, it appealed mostly to intellectuals and teachers rather than peasants and industrial workers. Being thrust into power revitalized the VNQDD as party leader Khanh became President of Vietnam. He presided over a government of national unity with the Communist Party of Vietnam as his junior partner, based on China’s alliance with Moscow. The leader of the Vietnamese communists, Ho Chi Minh, was made Vice President for that reason. One of the first acts of this new republic, a country of 32 million people, was to declare war on its former colonial overlord France. The Republic of Vietnam Army was created from 25.000 soldiers that had defected from French service and it rapidly swelled as conscription was introduced while the Vietnam’s Chinese allies provided weapons and training.

The Republic of China Army, the new name of the National Revolutionary Army since 1944, had transformed in the decade since the Sino-Soviet victory over Japan into a formidable force: it had reorganized along Soviet lines and adopted Deep Operations doctrine. Initially, China had received thousands of BT-5, BT-7 and T-26 tanks as the Red Army replaced them with the T-34, allowing them to practice with a large tank force with the assistance of Soviet trainers. After the T-34’s mass production had reached the required levels, China began purchasing them to become the mainstay of their tank arm. With Soviet assistance, they built a gigantic production complex near Beijing so they could produce their own. Similarly, Chinese factories produced Soviet designed aircraft, communications equipment, trucks, aircraft, artillery, machine guns and SVT-40 battle rifles in large quantities for a mechanized force. The Republic of China Army at its peak would number 20 million men, making it the only military in the world to exceed the Red Army in terms of sheer manpower. A decade of peace had prepared the Republic of China for war.

China didn’t stop at conquering French Indochina, but continued inexorably as it mobilized for what it called “the war of Asian liberation.” In early January 1954, Chinese forces concentrated and increased in strength in Thailand, reaching a strength of nearly 500.000 men while millions more were mobilized in the vast expanses of China. The “Southeast Asia Theatre Army” was split into the “Burma Theatre Army” and the “Malay Theatre Army”, which numbered a quarter of a million men each and had a few Thai divisions for support. The British had 75.000 men in Burma and 175.000 in Malaya. With a superiority in terms of manpower, tanks, artillery and aircraft the Chinese overran Burma in seven weeks and Malay in four weeks, reaching Singapore.

Singapore was defended by the mighty guns of a squadron of Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers while aircraft carriers provided around the clock air cover. On March 7th, ten weeks after the invasion of Malay had been launched and six after the beginning of the Siege of Singapore, the Royal Navy evacuated the last troops and the city fell. The sultanates of Malaya were gently coerced into forming the Malayan Confederation and declaring war on their former British colonizers. By that time, Chinese forces had already rushed through Burma and had established an independent Burmese republic before moving on to India.

Vastly numerically superior Chinese forces defeated the British Indian Army at Kohima and Imphal and advanced despite the extremely challenging terrain provided by the mountainous Himalayan northeast of India. In the spring of 1954 Chinese strength on the Indian Front swelled to more than one million men and their forces advanced across the mountains despite fierce resistance and serious casualties. Nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed the Republic of India as soon as his 80.000 strong “Indian National Army” set foot on Indian soil. Bose chose Dacca as his temporary capital as the war continued, though it became more and more clear Bose’s army and its Chinese backers wouldn’t advance much further. The Chinese were halted just east of the old capital of Calcutta. Nepal and Bhutan were also occupied.

The British Indian Army upon reaching its full strength would number 2.5 million, a number that the British hoped to increase massively by the controversial proposal of conscription. India was a subcontinent with 400 million people living in it. This was a vast manpower pool that, if the British could mobilize it, could give the West an army big enough to reverse the victories of the Soviets and the Chinese. The response of Indian leaders to this idea was exactly what one could expect: they were irate at first at the thought of their countrymen being drafted to fight for continued British colonial rule over India without even being consulted in the matter. The controversy resulted in widespread protests and calls to resist being drafted, but soon there were also those who recognized this as both a necessity and an opportunity. India had to fight because becoming a Chinese puppet was not an acceptable alternative to British rule, and yet British rule wasn’t what they wanted either.

The price for India going along with this would be a concrete British promise to grant independence at a to be agreed upon date in the near future. This time Indian leaders wouldn’t settle for increased suffrage, more autonomy, more elected members to the Imperial Legislative Council and some vague commitment to independence at an undefined point. Nehru, Gandhi, Jinah and the others threatened with strikes and massive resistance to conscription and with Chinese forces on the Ganges the British could hardly deal with such instability. This left Whitehall no choice but to agree despite the heated debates in parliament and the opposition by the Tories that threatened to create a rupture in wartime cooperation.

Great Britain promised independence, using a tried and proven design to still ensure a link would remain between it and its former colony. It was agreed that a new Government of India act would be prepared so it could be passed once the war was over. This act would grant India dominion status as the first non-white dominion in the British Empire, giving the country self-governance and thereby de facto independence in the same way as countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Dominion status would make India equal to Britain and in no way subordinate in its domestic or external affairs, though still part of the Commonwealth through an allegiance to the Crown. The country’s new name would be the Indian Empire as the monarch of Britain would also still hold the title Emperor or Empress of India. Given that Britain’s monarchy was purely a constitutional one, this had no effect on India’s self-rule. The Viceroy that acted in the place of the British monarch would become a purely ceremonial head of state once the new Government of India Act went into effect. The Indian Empire’s financial, industrial and military assistance would prove crucial in the war, sending ten million men to fight, and the country would emerge from the conflict as the fourth largest industrial power. In due time India would become the leading nation of the Empire.

Before India’s weight could be felt, Great Britain faced another crisis in the Middle East in the spring of 1954. He demanded that the Iranian government be allowed to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and wanted to break open the last agreement, which was supposed to last sixty years. Britain refused on both points as yielding would show weakness, which could in turn encourage other countries in the British sphere of influence to get ideas. Faced with British obstinacy, the parliament (Majlis) voted to nationalize Iran’s oil and expel foreign corporate representatives from the country. Shah Mohammad Reza openly backed the move and his popularity was boosted immensely among his subjects, but the British on the other hand were outraged.

In Westminster the proper response to Iran’s unilateral action was hotly debated. In Labour circles there was a strong argument that Britain should do nothing at all as the country couldn’t spare any troops for a pseudo-colonial adventure on the Persian Gulf. With no military means available in the region, even the Iranians with their mediocre army could help themselves to any territory they’d wand to annex. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill – who had returned to his old post for the second and last time in 1951 after four years of absence, after the Tories returned to power – voiced the position of the Conservative Party the best. He said: “If we do nothing, we’ll let everyone think they can steal from us and end up the beggar of Europe rather than the head of a sprawling global Empire on which the sun never sets. The Shah must be made to understand that, if he doesn’t back down, this means war.”

A middle ground was found. Britain had affected regime change before in its long history as a colonial power and it decided to do so again by staging a coup d’état. MI6 devised Operation Achilles, which envisaged using elements of the Imperial Iranian Army to establish a military dictatorship that would disband the Majles, renegotiate the oil concession, accept copious British bribes to do so, and isolate the Shah by establishing a regency under his brother Prince Gholam Reza. The coup failed as Shah Mohammad Reza wasn’t where intelligence had said he would be, preventing his capture early on by the plotters and enabling him to countermand their orders and broadcast a declaration over the radio. As a result most of the armed forces and the population closed ranks behind him, which caused the coup attempt to collapse and the plotters to be arrested and executed. The Shah’s brother, Prince Gholam Reza, was put under house arrest.

Iran responded to this coup by declaring war on Britain and, much as Labour had feared, British interests in the region came under immediate assault. Iran supported a successful coup in neighbouring Iraq by elements of the military and a movement called the Ba’ath Party, which espoused Arab nationalist, Arab socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist positions. After seizing control and overthrowing the monarchy, Colonel Abdul Salam Arif, an independent with pan-Arabist sympathies, became President and nationalized Iraqi oil following Iran’s example. French Syria, British ruled Transjordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were all at risk of falling prey to Arif’s ambitions to create an Arab Federation. As the Soviets sent support forces, the Middle East became another front in the war. France and Britain sent forces here, with the majority of them coming from the British Indian Army as no-one could afford to remove troops from the European theatre of the war.

In May 1954, the war in Europe resumed as the Red Army launched the spring offensive that was intended to deal the decisive blow by advancing to the Rhine, which would’ve crushed Germany and thereby any hope that the Soviets could be dislodged from their conquests. It was not to be. With its mobilization complete and colonial forces arriving from Morocco, Algeria and other colonies French troop strength on the German Front had doubled. During the same period the BEF had grown to 1.5 million men as Britain continued to field more and more new divisions thanks to conscription. Furthermore, Canadian and Anzac forces arrived that operated under the aegis of the BEF. The disparity in numbers between the Red Army and the West wasn’t that big anymore. Besides that, the logistical issues surrounding supplying such a colossal force so far from home remained. Moreover, it overextended itself by getting involved in the Middle East too.

The Soviet spring offensive between May and July was a tactical success in the sense that new territory was conquered, but a strategic failure as the Red Army got nowhere near the Rhine. Soviet and Czechoslovak forces made serious inroads into Bavaria by conquering Nuremberg and Regensburg. In Austria they crossed the Danube and took Vienna, after which the advanced westward before they grinded to a halt in the Alps where they encountered determined resistance. Stalin was disappointed with this outcome, but he was also pragmatic and he recognized the Soviet Union still had the upper hand in the war and the ability to make this war even more difficult for his enemies.

Red Spain had remained neutral on Moscow’s instructions so far, but that was about to change. In July 1954, Spain declared war on France and launched an offensive across the Pyrenees mountain range into Roussillon, a region that had been disputed by France and Spain for more than a century until Louis XIII had settled the matter in France’s favour in 1641. A lingering Catalan identity remained in the mid twentieth century and this was used to justify Spanish aggression. Despite Soviet investments and assistance, Spain had remained a medium power and its army was professional and competent but not very large.

The fiery temper of the Spanish translated to a rapid advance in the first few days of their offensive and the capture of Perpignan in southern France while in the far south they besieged Gibraltar. The Spanish were contained in southern France by three army corps, tying down some troops but not enough to affect the main front in Germany while Gibraltar held out against a Spanish siege in which the Rock was shelled and bombed around the clock. The Spanish were quickly thrown back across the Pyrenees. The Royal Navy and the French Navy imposed a naval blockade on Spain intended to simply starve it into submission. Their navies also made sure Gibraltar received reinforcements and supplies so it could hold out indefinitely.