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Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline

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Sulemain said:
Yeah, and a total ignorance of soft sciences and such-and an ignorance of how useful they are.
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It seems like this untermenchen believes in J U D E N P H Y S I K S. The true aryan people can more than easily spontaneously manifest anything this J U D E N P H Y S I K S claims to be capable of. Their so called "atomic power" of J U D I S C H E P H Y S I K S will never amount to much!
 
IMHO the Nazis were gangsters out to plunder burn and control all they can. Some had romantic notions of small farmers and workshops that were already a century out of date. In an alternate histories that have the Third Reich survive or victorious after they burned out their resources with endless guerilla war and megaprojects they would either engage in some massive war or suffer a massive collapse that would make the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda look like Sunday picnics.

As for the Pre-Crusade period in Reds! I see lots of White American/British and French capital and various experts and expatriates travelling to various countries to build personal empires, seek higher returns on capital and to fight the Communist Menace. So in many places we would see the investors and experts become part of the ruling class and co-opt various parts (military, church, landowners) with bribes, promises of power or basic threats. Since many of the local elites are able to see the results of ignoring this with the Second American Revolution, Russian Revolution and the spread of Communism in Latin America they would agree to this. So while in public we see Great Leader and his people in front it is the experts and bankers running things behind the scenes (think Speer or TTL Ford).

Post-war this drive towards industrialization and efficiency would lead to more developed economy in the AFS members in Africa/Latin America and Asia along with post-war investment from the FBU to develop more markets and obtain raw materials. However this wealth would be concentrated in the hands of a few families or politically connected individuals.
 
Really, when you actually deeply look at the Nazi regime and see how it was a fractal fuckup it becomes more and more astonishing that they did as well as they did.
 
SirKaid said:
Really, when you actually deeply look at the Nazi regime and see how it was a fractal fuckup it becomes more and more astonishing that they did as well as they did.
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A little bit of luck at the right moments can go a long way. Arguably Nazi Germany's biggest break was the spectacular success of the invasion of France. Their military and economy were never equipped for a prolonged war of attrition. As a result of disastrous strategic deployments of their forces and the German Ardennes traffic jam miraculously not getting discovered by, say, a random reconnaissance over-flight, what should have been a certain defeat for the Wehrmacht turned into a whirlwind campaign that took down what was viewed as the most powerful army in Europe in six weeks.

One of the most surprisingly educational alternate timelines I've ever encountered is A Blunted Sickle, which is an incredibly nerdy day-by-day deep dive into the various aspects of early World War II, where a slightly modified and more cautious French deployment of forces results in the German blitzkrieg getting bogged down, cut off, and surrounded in Paris. It was pretty enlightening when I first encountered it back in the day.

Of course, the astonishing success of Nazi Germany against France planted its own seeds of disaster for them that became significant factors in their defeat against the USSR...
 
veteranMortal said:
It, uhh, was discovered? Repeatedly. Many reconnaissance aircraft saw the German forces in the Ardennes, French high command just didn't believe them.
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:stunned silence:

:awkward pause:

:sound of a head repeatedly slamming into a desk:

So French High Command repeatedly had the option to salvage the situation, fix the mess, and yet they basically sat on their asses while the stranded French forces fought like lions before getting cut off?

The stereotype shouldn't be "French people are Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys", it should be "French military leaders are complete idiots" (as proven by Vietnam later too).
 
Gamelin was almost shockingly inept at managing France's defence to the point where one could be forgiven for asking whether he was actually a German agent.
 
Saint_007 said:
:stunned silence:

:awkward pause:

:sound of a head repeatedly slamming into a desk:

So French High Command repeatedly had the option to salvage the situation, fix the mess, and yet they basically sat on their asses while the stranded French forces fought like lions before getting cut off?

The stereotype shouldn't be "French people are Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys", it should be "French military leaders are complete idiots" (as proven by Vietnam later too).
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i will give them a little bit more credit in that the commander's job is to account for the occaisions when reports, especially by inexperienced troops in a panic, magnify the scale of the threat. but yes, there were repeated opportunities to shore up the the very thin defenses on the Meuse, and multiple instances of the organization of counterattack being frustrated by the byzantine nature of the Allied command structure.

More than Gamelin should be blamed though. Huntziger, who commanded the French Second Army, and Touchon, who commanded the Sixth Army, were always one step behind the situation, and failed to deal with the bridgeheads in a timely manner. as a result, the Panzer forces peeled the two armies apart at the seam and pushed to the coast.
 
Mental Omega said:
Gamelin was almost shockingly inept at managing France's defence to the point where one could be forgiven for asking whether he was actually a German agent.
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I remember a similar joke from a BBC book, "From D-Day to Berlin". German soldiers would joke that the Allies would wait at the destroyed Fuhrer Bunker, one man would get out of it, dust himself off, remove the toothbrush mustache, and proudly declare "mission completed, sirs; Germany destroyed!" You can guess who the supposed agent was. And why said joke was only said to trusted acquaintances; it was very easy to lose one's head over it.

Then again, inept commanders are almost a universal constant, there are just too many examples of where a perfectly plausible defense catastrophically collapsed because the commander in charge couldn't get his head out of his ass. Sometimes you recover from the loss, remove the failure and put someone who at least knows something of what they're doing, sometimes you don't, and your nation collapses because now you have a massive hole in your defenses.
 
Saint_007 said:
Then again, inept commanders are almost a universal constant, there are just too many examples of where a perfectly plausible defense catastrophically collapsed because the commander in charge couldn't get his head out of his ass. Sometimes you recover from the loss, remove the failure and put someone who at least knows something of what they're doing, sometimes you don't, and your nation collapses because now you have a massive hole in your defenses.
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Makes sense. Though, I'm curious: What are some other "ww2 France"-tier failures throughout history?
 
General_Urist said:
Makes sense. Though, I'm curious: What are some other "ww2 France"-tier failures throughout history?
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Let's see...

Barbarossa comes to mind, though a large part of it was that the Red Army, having seen the massive breakthrough of mobile warfare (used by the Germans) and its victory over positional warfare (used by the French), the Soviet high command decided to do a massive restructuring and reorganization, and weren't expecting to get in a fight until late 1942 at the earliest. Plus, after Stalin's purges the officer corps was for crap. The USSR managed to recover from that mostly because they had a massive manpower pool, way too much territory to conquer quickly, and massive errors in German strategic doctrines that meant the early victories of 1941 ultimately meant nothing.

The big one I'm thinking of is the Japanese invasion of Korea, 1592-8. Korea had no experience fighting on land for a long time by then, true, but a lot went wrong that made things worse. The Korean navy just sat in port while the Royal Court was trying to decide if the massive Japanese fleet coming in was a trade delegation or a war fleet - which they found out was the latter only when they disgorged tons of Japanese troops onto Korean land and they started hacking and slashing the place up. And the Korean navy? Got scuttled in harbor after doing nothing.

Yi Sun Shin, the best and most underappreciated naval commander of all time, managed to turn this around by taking a few dozen ships and repeatedly sinking Japanese fleets many times his size, all while taking 0 losses in ships and a few casualties (mainly injuries, almost no deaths) every time. Then the Japanese tried to lure him into a trap by feigning a rift between two commanders and pointing out where a supply fleet was coming in. Yi didn't take the bait, knowing it was a trap, but his enemies in court said it was a sign he was a coward, and had him arrested, tortured, and demoted, and put a man called Won Gyun instead (Won Gyun being the man in charge of the Korean navy and did nothing when the first Japanese landing waves begun, then scuttled his fleet when the invasion began in earnest, btw). Won Gyun immediately took the bait - and surprise, surprise, it was indeed a massive Japanese trap. Won Gyun ordered a head-on assault, and when his navy got butchered, he had a nervous breakdown and couldn't issue orders. His fleet was annihilated, with only a dozen ships surviving from out of 150. In the end, they had to bring back Yi from his disgrace to fix those problems and rebuild the fleet almost from scratch. The fact that the Japanese lost the Imjin War was almost entirely because Yi managed to turn things around again (only to die in the last, fateful Battle of Noryang).

There was also the infamous General Gideon "The Self-Inflating" Pillow, who was a friend of Jefferson Davis and got his ties to secure a military command. He surrendered two forts without a single shot, mostly by running away and saving his own skin. Hell, Grant, undersupplied and outnumbered, took Fort Donelson without a shot because he knew that Pillow would waste the entrenchments and fortifications surrounding the fort. Admittedly, that's cheating, since Gideon was immediately suspended following his horrible performance, and was only in command of a fort, not of a military theater.
 
General_Urist said:
Makes sense. Though, I'm curious: What are some other "ww2 France"-tier failures throughout history?
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WW2 Italy. Mussolini himself said Italy wouldn't be ready for war before 42/43 when the war started. Then France collapsed and he went vulture mode... Only to prove himself right. Generalized lack of equipment and supplies for the army, inadequate tanks, an air force looking like a laundry list of every possible type of failed aircraft in every category before the actually good models would begin to see production later in the war, North Africa, Greece... It's a bloody miracle Italy only capitulated in 1943.
 
SirKaid said:
Really, when you actually deeply look at the Nazi regime and see how it was a fractal fuckup it becomes more and more astonishing that they did as well as they did.
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I've been reading Kershaw's biography of Hitler, only having got to the mid-1920s, and while I was aware that Hitler could served with kid gloves repeatedly, it is legitimately infuriating just how many opportunities there were to squash him and the Nazis like a bug that were not taken for the most venal reasons imaginable.

On the subject of France/WW2 like disasters, I'd advance the Prussian campaign of 1806 as a pretty spectacular screwup.
 
TGUT said:
I've been reading Kershaw's biography of Hitler, only having got to the mid-1920s, and while I was aware that Hitler could served with kid gloves repeatedly, it is legitimately infuriating just how many opportunities there were to squash him and the Nazis like a bug that were not taken for the most venal reasons imaginable.

On the subject of France/WW2 like disasters, I'd advance the Prussian campaign of 1806 as a pretty spectacular screwup.
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Hitler was a gambler playing a VERY risky game plan.
I advance the Persian invasion of Greece(though that was less due to Persian incompetance than S P A R T A .
 
dcd said:
I advance the Persian invasion of Greece(though that was less due to Persian incompetance than S P A R T A .
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Given that Athens was razed and a lot of northern Greece overrun, I'd hardly call that as crushing a defeat as the Battle of France. Sure, the Hellenistic powers won in the short term, but it took them thirty years to drive the Persians out of the north, and the Spartans were really overrated in my opinion during it. It was mostly the Athenians, especially their navy, plus the combined weight of the alliance.
 
As far as the US go I'd say the worse military disaster that would likely be hands down be St. CLair's defeat in 1791 hands down as it practically wiped out the American military and the US army pretty much had to be raised and trained from scratch afterwards in the aftermath.
 
ArvisPresley said:
It seems like this untermenchen believes in J U D E N P H Y S I K S. The true aryan people can more than easily spontaneously manifest anything this J U D E N P H Y S I K S claims to be capable of. Their so called "atomic power" of J U D I S C H E P H Y S I K S will never amount to much!
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Funny story-they might have gotten the bomb anyway,but Hitler's scientists overestimated the time needed to create the bomb,so Hitler didn't give them as much funding as they needed because he thought the war would be over either way by the time anyone got the bomb.
 
Adonisus said:
'National Bolshevism' is a recent creation, and largely a meme started by the (now very dead) Eduard Liminov. It won't exist in this universe.

As for Strasserism, it will be treated the same way all Nazi-related ideologies will be treated: ruthlessly suppressed.
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FYI German National Bolshevism existed as a current in the KPD as early as the 1920s, Russian Nazbols are the ones who are a lot more recent, a post-Soviet phenomenon
 
What's going to happen to Polish soldiers captured by the Soviet in 1939? I imagine that there is no Katyn equivalent, but are they mostly just kept in POW camps, or is the USSR already trying to set up a Polish army of liberation under pressure/with the assistance of the Polish National Liberation Front?
 
SpookyBoy said:
FYI German National Bolshevism existed as a current in the KPD as early as the 1920s, Russian Nazbols are the ones who are a lot more recent, a post-Soviet phenomenon
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Eh, "in the KPD" is a bit generous, as is "the 1920s." The group around Laufenberg and Wolffheim was expelled from the KPD about as soon as the latter finished picking itself up from the debacle of 1919, and they only found refuge in the KAPD (which was expelled around the same time) for as long as it took for that party to put in its Comintern application.
 
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dcd said:
Funny story-they might have gotten the bomb anyway,but Hitler's scientists overestimated the time needed to create the bomb,so Hitler didn't give them as much funding as they needed because he thought the war would be over either way by the time anyone got the bomb.
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I read somewhere Hitler had like three or four competing nuclear weapons projects working concurrently, all competing for the same funding and resources.

Seriously, Hitler loved that. He encouraged competition among his underlings by creating competing responsibilities and duties as part of his social darwinist outlook, so he can be their supreme arbiter and keep his position safe.

Just in case you needed another example of why Nazism just didn't work long-term.
 
I can't believe you idiots don't understand the obvious genius of the Fuhrer! By having four competing groups work at a nuclear program at the same time, research speed would have been four times as fast! And once the Reich got the nuke we would've bombed the US cause the American player would not have had their Air force up and the Germans would have had Air Superiority! As detailed in the historical documentary Hearts of Iron 4!
 
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