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Chapter V: The Second Great War Part One, 1939-1943
War had been declared and the Soviet Republic immediately struck with amazing force. In a hopeless attempt to save their capital, the Lithuanian Army was wiped out on the first day of the war and Vilnius fell. The Polish didn’t suffer the same fate, but of the four Polish armies, two were all but destroyed before the New Year, either taken prisoner or dead, and the Red Army continued her unstoppable advance to Warsaw. The city put up a fierce fight, but fell within two days on January 5th, 1940. Farther north, Lithuania and most of East-Prussia were overrun, cutting off the Baltic Duchy. The little nation was destroyed in days as well and after two weeks of warfare, the Soviet Republic controlled the Baltics and most of Poland, and the Baltic Duke Eitel Friedrich was a Soviet Russian prisoner.
The Ukraine also got a heavy blow dealt to it as the Red Army attacked them and crushed any and all resistance. The Soviet advance swept through the nation westwards, ignoring only the Crimea for now. Kiev fell to Soviet hands on January 12th and the Autonomous Ukrainian Soviet Republic was proclaimed as part of the SSR. Imperial Russia was also attacked and was no match for the stronger Soviet armies. Tsar Vladimir fled to the Ottoman Empire as Astrakhan and Volgograd burned. The Soviets attacked the Caucasus mountains where they were slowed down significantly by the Ottoman resistance and had to stop before reaching Baku. Georgia and Daghestan fell, but the Ottoman Empire remained safe for now.
The SSR also invaded the Balkans. After crushing the Ukraine, Romania came under attack. The proud little Balkan country had a strong army and mobilized a higher percentage of it’s population than any other country. Nevertheless, the speed and strength of the Soviet armies were too strong for even Romania. The poor nation was overrun in two weeks, which caused Serbia and Greece to see a chance for revenge against their old enemies. Serbia declared war on the Allies on January 29th, followed by Greece three days later. Together, the three Axis countries invaded Bulgaria which was helpless against the onslaught and went down in six days. The hammer and sickle were risen above Sofia which was the ultimate humiliation as it was accompanied by the Serbian and Greek flags. Serbia and Greece had their revenge.
In Poland and German Prussia, the Red Army continued her advance as well. By now, however, more and more reinforcements were sent in from France and Britain. Also, the SSR began to suffer from serious overstretch. They took Poznan on February 1st and Danzig the day after but their advance was much slower than it could’ve been thanks to serious German and Polish resistance. The Red Army now advanced towards the Oder where the French and British reinforcements halted them near Breslau. The city became the scene of street-for-street fighting and the Red Army was slowed down and came to a halt. They just couldn’t advance any farther anymore because their losses were rising. Even the Russian bear couldn’t take any and all losses it was faced with. The offensive was stopped.
Soviet advance also stopped on other places like in the east where the Khanate of Central Asia had all but fallen but British aid prevented Afghanistan and Persia from being captured. In Hungary Bratislava or Pressburg as it is called in Germany also fell thanks to the treacherous commander of the area, one colonel Adolf Hitler. He had been deployed to the area to defend Slovakia (local name for north-Hungary) from falling into Soviet hands but gave Pressburg up without a fight which allowed the SSR to penetrate into German territory here as well and nearly reach Vienna. Hitler was arrested for treason and executed on his birthday, April 20th 1940. It was obvious that he was a Soviet spy who had deliberately helped the Red Army advance although his own declaration about his actions was that he ‘didn’t want to give German lives for the defense of the subhuman Slovak Slavs’. Of course the judges saw that this was a lie and Hitler was executed for the betrayal of Germany to the communist invaders.
In the south the SSR was also stopped in her advance along with her Greek and Serb allies. They managed to conquer Sarajevo and Belgrade but only after a very long struggle and the frontlines solidified here as well. The frontline now ran from the Baltic coast along the Oder river, then following the German-Hungarian border in the regions known as Bohemia and North-Hungary, then diving slightly into Germany again before leaving it, following the Danube river in Hungary until Mohacs where it went southwards until reaching the Bosna and Neretva rivers and reaching the coast of the Adriatic in Italian Dalmatia. In the north, where the SSR had invaded Finland, they had conquered most of the country but Finland still existed and was holding out at a frontline running from Murmansk to Oulu.
Trench warfare ensued in all parts of Europe as neither side could break the stalemate. The battle of Breslau was becoming a brutal war which cost the lives of thousands and thousands of Russians and Alliance soldiers. The Alliance had air supremacy and bombed the Soviet positions without mercy. Diplomatically the Soviet situation also went down as all Alliance members declared that the Empire of all Russia’s would be restored as the sole Russian government post-war and ceased recognizing the SSR as an independent nation, just as a group of organized rebels trying to resist against the legitimate Russian government and attacking the Alliance countries while at it. In the Far East, similar declarations were issued about the Empire of China which was to be restored as the sole Chinese government post-war. This was a big diplomatic stunt but it made the SSR and the PRC even more determined to win.
Being formally at war with a communist power, France now took the opportunity to declare support for the Spanish government should it join the Central Powers, which they did on May 12th with their declaration of war upon the Soviet Republic. While Spain had their dreams of gaining French lands back which they had just lost they didn’t have much of a chance to win a three-way-war between themselves, the communist rebels and the Alliance, and thus they sided with their natural allies against communism. For the moment this meant surprisingly little as the civil war went on in Spain with the Alliance being too busy to help the Spanish efforts to keep communism away from them. They had their own things to do.
With the current positions of the fronts, one nation was highly threatened: the Ottoman Empire. The Balkan nations had gone down and Greco-Soviet forces were now invading Eastern Thrace from the west while Soviet tanks bombed Baku and attempted to attack in the Caucasus. Trotsky had fired several important generals and strategists whom he blamed for the failure of the invasion and replaced them by others, among whom the famous general Zhukov who deduced that the mistake had been in attacking too many countries at once. Instead the new Soviet offensive would only target two regions, namely Finland and the Ottoman Empire. Both areas were already highly under Soviet threat and their fall would undermine Soviet morale. Most of the forces were sent to the south as the Ottoman offensive had more chances of succeeding.
On May 11th the Soviet Republic started her offensive in Finland and attacked Swedish and Finnish positions. The armies orderly retreated to the Swedish pre-war borders and a massive guerilla war ensued. In the south, the offensive started on May 15th and had more success. Thrace was taken and Baku also fell which cut off the Ottoman main oil source. Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani communist republics were proclaimed and soon the Soviets stood on the pre-war border. In this offensive the Crimea also fell which the Ottoman Empire had been protecting since the collapse of the Ukraine. Only Sevastopol held and would hold for now. The Greeks had in the meanwhile launched an attack on the Italian Dodecanese islands which were surrendered without much of a fight as Italy hadn’t got a real good position there. They also invaded the Ottoman mainland near Smyrna which fell to Greek troops. Constantinople, the ancient Greek capital, was besieged and the Greeks and Soviets were very close to realizing the old Russian dream of taking the old city and liberating it from Muslim rule which had lasted for 484 years by now as it had been 1453 when the city fell to Ottoman offensives and the old Roman Empire was destroyed. Constantinople wouldn’t fall though as every Turk man was called to defend the empire and do his duty. The Greeks and Soviets did take several important buildings in the city but didn’t manage to destroy resistance all together or even cross the Bosporus. That remained out of reach for them. The vicious battle of Constantinople did cause Ottoman troops to be withdrawn from Cyprus where they had been close to defeating Greece. Instead Greek forces counterattacked and ‘liberated’ the island which was annexed into Greece on the first of June.
In the Middle East, things had taken an unexpected turn. With clear Soviet successes everywhere, Persia had risen up in revolt against British rule and had pushed out their British overlords. They declared war on the Alliance which caused the Soviets to come to their aid as they could never fight the British Empire alone. In a series of decisive summer battles, the British Empire had to give up Persia which became a republic as the People’s Republic of Iran, which would be the new name for the country. Backed by their new allies, the SSR also invaded Afghanistan but got stuck in trench warfare in Kabul by the end of August.
Once again, the SSR attempted a try to push the Ottomans so far that they would surrender. The Red Army linked up with the Persian People’s Army in Greater Azerbaijan, thus bringing the Caspian Sea under Russian sovereignty once more. An invasion of Eastern Anatolia was launched that took Erzurum, along with a Persian offensive that almost took Baghdad. However, the Ottoman Empire prevailed and Baghdad turned into another trench warfare city and suffered the same fate it had suffered during the First World War when it had been highly disputed between the Ottoman government and the British invaders. Now the invaders were Persian and Soviet Russian instead but the basic idea remained the same. Baghdad wouldn’t fall however. The Ottoman Empire had become too strong for that. It could fight a two-front-war and even managed to fight a third front as the Arabs had risen up in revolt again. Mecca was taken and an independent Arabia proclaimed. The Arabians openly allied with Soviet Russia which caused the Alliance to officially proclaim that Arabia would be destroyed after the war. The Ottomans managed to halt Arab offensives towards Mesopotamia which might’ve caused a Soviet-Arabian link-up. Instead the Ottoman Empire held out and Arab control was limited over the Arabian peninsula minus the oil fields in the east which were fiercely protected by an Ottoman garrison and refused to fall.
Italy was dealing with some problems of her own in Ethiopia where the Ethiopian independence ideal was no longer an unrealistic hope. Most of the old Ethiopian Empire had been retaken and a new emperor was proclaimed in Addis Abeba. Thanks to the war in Europe and Asia Italy could not afford to spare troops to conquer the region, but they were confident that one day Ethiopia would return to Italian sovereignty as it should be. Therefore, they simply let the Ethiopians be.
In Baluchistan and Afghanistan the Soviet Republic then made their final offensive in late November which was a great success and eliminated Afghan resistance. The British and Indians orderly retreated to the Indus river which was reinforced with Indian armies. India had been mobilized to fight their enemy and, fearing that the enemy would attempt to force Soviet atheism upon them, the Hindu Indians were willing to fight for the Empire of India. King-Emperor Edward VIII/I personally traveled to India to boost the morale of the Indian soldiers and promised them even more rights after the war. As such the Soviet position on the Indus was becoming a line they could not hold. Already their opponents had achieved numerical equality and better techniques. It was just a matter of time when the Soviets would be pushed back.
For now however the SSR had reached the ultimate extent of her conquests. She controlled Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan, the Balkans, parts of eastern Anatolia and eastern Mesopotamia, Finland, eastern Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, half of China and Germany up to the Danube. The land that the SSR controlled was more than the land the Mongols had controlled under Djenghis Khan. The Soviet Republic appeared to stand victorious but was suffering from overstretch and exhaustion. They had crossed the limits of what they could possibly hold and would suffer the consequences soon enough. That was the situation when 1940 ended and 1941 began.
In the far east the situation was grave. Whereas Soviet advances in the 1930s had strengthened the position of the SSR’s vassal, the People’s Republic of China, their authority was beginning to weaken due to the full Alliance backing that Japan now had and the Japanese advances in the region. With most of the Soviet troops being in Western Europe, Japan was unstoppable and pushed the SSR out of Jiangsu, Anhui and Hubei. Japanese possession of Inner Manchuria was consolidated and strengthened. More and more, the Chinese themselves began to side with Japan. The communist rule was a hard life and at least Japan had
some morals and was in favor of a united China, while the Soviet Republic had carved off Mongolia and Ughyurstan already and wanted to do the same with Manchuria as an independent People’s Republic of Manchukuo if the area was ever conquered. As such, the Chinese decided that siding with Japan was for their own good, and so they did so and started supporting Japan from then on.
In the west the Alliance had strengthened from the defeats that the SSR had brought upon them the previous year. On January 17th, they attacked with all the strength they had in the direction of Belgrade. The German and Hungarian forces broke through Russian lines and took out Soviet holdings in Hungary. Next, they struck towards Romania which caused the Soviets to abandon their Greek allies as they knew perfectly well what was coming here. After harsh fighting, the Alliance managed to reach the coast of Constanza by early February and cut off all Soviet troops in Wallachia, Bulgaria and Thrace, as well as their Serb and Greek allies. Having done so, the Alliance conquered Moldavia and solidified their frontline in the east at the Boeg and the Vistula rivers. Turning southwards, they also ejected the Soviet armies from Wallachia and restored Romania as an independent nation with the conquest of Bucharest on March 5th, where the Romanian king entered his capital again three days later, dressed as a victor.