Hackett believes that the German army is essentially finished after the Eurasian War and is letting his biases from his own timeline colour his perception of German prioritisation of a presence in Africa. Whereas in Reds! Hitler generally agreed that Africa was more the domain of Mussolini and that Germany's destiny was more towards a conquest of Northern Eurasia and an eventual conquest and partition of the UASR, the African RKs are considered of tremendous value to the Reich of TNO as they provide everything from luxury agricultural goods to precious minerals to cheap uranium and cobalt as well as the prestige of accomplishing the dream of German Mittelafrika where the Kaiserreich could not.
Plus, the last time there was a colonial conflict with Germany over Africa it was a cakewalk, with all German colonies in WW1 falling in pretty short order followed by chasing around some guerillas.
Of course, they're not the same Germany, this isn't the same war, and the Arikaschild troops are some of Germany's best, specifically trained and readied for slugfest or bullrushes into the African territories of rivals os well as overwhelming Cameroon and South Africa, whereas the Russian border had most of its strength stripped out after the west Russian war because surely the Russians couldn't come back for round four right? May as well move their high-quality troops to the borders with the Triumvirate and to other sphere of influence friction zones.
Plus, Hackett's the guy who lead the Peacekeepers to fight the Revolutionary International Volunteer Red Army to a standstill in the Horn of Africa (with extensive support from Egypt and Arabia mind you) in the prior decade and successfully swept out the Mau-Mau, he clearly knows what he's doing right?
So yeah, a "MacArthur in North Korea situation", where the CinCs contempt for the enemy's backers leads him to ignore intelligence warnings while his superiors are unwilling to gainsay him due to a combination of his prestige and their own biases.
Excerpt from "Rise of the East" from the Guardian, 2023
In the present century, we often speak of a smorgasbord of major powers from Asia as defining the future, the Empire of Great Japan, the Worker's Socialist Republic of China and the Greater Indian Commonwealth being the three most prominent, but hardly the only ones. Each of these countries enjoys a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council with the power of Veto, and all three are recognised as first-rate nuclear powers. Even as tensions mount in the New Order's Europe, the tripartite balance in Asia is held by many analysts to be the future or even current fulcrum of geopolitics, as the period following the Worldmerge was so often defined by the precarious power plays between the Third Reich, the Franco-British Union, and the Union of American Socialist Republics.
Even as the 90th anniversary of the revolution celebrations in Red May's America calm down, a visitor to DeLeon D.C and a cursory examination of Sara Innnamorato's government in the Capitol would get the impression that the home of the second great revolution is more concerned with the outcome of the Kabul "Indo-Pacific Atomic Conference" nuclear summit hosting Chinese Premier Wu Rongrong, Indian Prime Minister Agatha Sangma, and Japanese Prime Minister Tomoko Abe than it is with the Geneva Summit, to the point of Innamorato herself attending the Kabul conference rather than Geneva, currently the matter of her Foreign Commissar Chokwe Lumumba.
However, the balance was not always so well defined, especially following the world merge sixty-one years ago, and when we look back to 1962 we find a very different world. Dialing things back, Japan had resolved the Dominican Missile crisis relatively amicably between Italy and America. Turning its attentions towards dealing with Communist insurgency in southeast Asia, internally the Empire was already seeing the issues of the bubbling Yasuda fraud and Ino Horoyia's political corruption scandals, leaving the Taisei Yokusankai, the dominating coalition of the "one empire, one diet, one association" era with little choice but to seek to oust the Prime Minister and replace him with someone whose reputation was less tarnished.
In a time of a skyrocketing population from a protracted baby boom as living conditions rose constantly higher and the "Daycare, School, and Meal" program had driven the cost of childcare lower than ever. The population had, when one accounted for the annexations across the Pacific, Hainan, Leizhou, well over doubled since the beginning of the war and its manpower reserves were the deepest of the four superpowers. Hawaii, Hainan, and Sakhalin now had teaming populations of Japanese and even the Californian Channel Islands and New Caledonia, conquered in the last stages of the Second World War, were now boasting bustling apartments and shops while mines dotted the island territories taken from the allies. In short, it was a good time to be Japanese, especially with the nearly universal belief that Japan could act, and its foes would have to react within the cold war.
While both the UASR and FBU on Red May had heavily economically distinct spheres, the general agreement of all major powers around capitalism gave the Empire access to the majority of the world's markets for export and import. Japanese cultural exports were picking up steam worldwide, even in countries that decried them as the product of the enemy; such as America, or of a racial "mongolising" menace such as Germany. Other countries such as Italy, Argentina, Mexico, and Turkiye embraced them wholeheartedly, with Kurosawa's and Ishiro Honda's films breaking box office records and new epics surpassing Hollywood, Babelsberg, and Cinecitta in terms of budget and screens.
Honda's film "Gojira", a veiled protest against the decision to use nuclear weapons on San Diego and Sacremento and an attempt to humanise the American victims of the bombings, had spawned a franchise and a household name to help build Toho's media empire. Toei now had a higher market cap than Disney thanks to favourable international trade regulations, and even German and American businessmen felt a need to learn Japanese to not be at a disadvantage.
"Miku ni hikari kagayaku
Miku ni towa ni
Tataeyo towa ni"
- Ode to the Co-Prosperity sphere
The Osaka system codified the measurement of the Gross Domestic Product, the same way that the Dover System in the Red May World did, and the Yen found a place as a reserve currency for the world and a means of universal foreign exchange thanks to Japan not being under embargo by any of the other three major powers and arrangements made with the Triumvirate to invest into its burgeoning oil industries. So extensive was the power of Japanese finance and banking that President Kefauver's attempts to hurt Japan with an embargo and Germany's attempts to divest from the Empire damaged the two of them more than Japan itself, leading to the unprecedented Nixon-Kennedy fusion ticket, the Germanic depression, and the breakdown of the OFN's united economic direction.
It's a testament to the feeling of confidence that the Yasuda financial scandal was only considered of moderate concern, an upset to be corrected by the Techocrats. Such a general feeling that while there were serious matters such as the Yasuda scandal or the Korean equality movement, they were always manageable ones. This is something exemplified by the "pragmatist" policy taken towards the Russian Warlords where ultimately, no matter who won, they would have a need of Japanese capital to rebuild and would thus be quite pliable, with even the most ardent socialists having value as perhaps a figurehead to place on a pet international that could steer the radical left towards directions that wouldn't inconvenience the Empire.
On the other side, Red China had celebrated the commissioning of its first indigenous fleet aircraft carriers, the Hainan and its sisters the Taiwan, the Chongming and the Leizhou. Designed with the aid of the UASR and its commission to aid in the militarisation of Japan and Korea, China's simultaneous launch of four new fleet carriers was meant to demonstrate Comintern commitment to uplifting the periphery and the equal place of nonwhite powers within its framework. Others however, saw the rapidly growing Chinese navy and the decision to rebuild the Japanese military as an unprecedentedly aggressive move meant to ensure hegemony over the pacific, especially when paired with naval expansion by the Soviet Pacific Fleet and the UASR's Latin American allies.
India similarly was working on growing its nuclear arsenal and its bluewater aspirations in the face of growing Soviet and Chinese naval power and the "Mosley doctrine" of focusing western Europe's fleets on the Atlantic while arming Oceania, Arabia, and India. Encouraged by the Keynes program of assisting debtor nations in developing industry to offload excess production while still tying the periphery to European technical expertise and financial structures, the Mosley Doctrine aimed to challenge the "red pacific" program of Mao Zedong's comintern as the cold war entered a new, hotter phase. All backed by an Indian business class increasingly aware of India's place and role in the world.
Though devastated by the Second World War, China was finally unified after decades of division, and the extensive investment from the Soviet Union and United Republics had revived the countryside and allowed for spectacular economic growth. By 1962, the country had taken the basis of industry seized from Manchukuo and the Beiyang Republic and the industry provided for its own war effort by the Allies and Comintern and made it the bedrock of rapid modernisation. A country once known as the "land of famine" by humanitarian workers in the thirties was now more electrified and literate than Stalin's Russia in the time of his secretaryship, and Zhou Enlai's proclamation that the "century of humiliation had ended" was followed by inviting even Central bloc leaders from Western Europe and South Asia to tour the new China as a show of diplomatic force.
Agriculture was largely mechanised, and cities were growing at a breakneck pace, pulling workers into expanding factories that were helping to provide consumer goods for the communist bloc and the machinery for yet further industrial development and modernisation. Literacy rates had climbed to the vast majority of the population. The country was starting to become a centre of technology through leveraging the ideas of a vast, freshly literate and educated population. A new, socialist form of Asiofuturism[1] was becoming widespread through the art of the Creation Society and the "Asian Sunrise" movement that celebrated the "realisation of the three principles of the people across China, Korea, and Japan".
Chinese culture was a "three-headed creature" in the words of Anthony Eden, who noted that the country was simultaneously celebrating Chinese "Socialist Patriotism", "Liberatory Pan-Asianism", and "Communist Internationalism. The first as a revival of a Chinese culture and society let down by poor leadership and external malignance. The second in essence, reclaiming the Concordist doctrine of Asian Supramodernism under a socialist lens that wished to show the world a non-European vision of the future, And the third in its celebration and adoration for other cultures such as Russia or America through a staunchly Marxist lens and proclaiming the inevitability of global revolution by the workers and peasants against the landlords and burghers.
The Chinese participation in the Comintern joint space program was a particular point of pride, with Li Han being widely celebrated as the first Chinese and East Asian in space through the COSMOCOM sharing program and being widely hailed as a national hero. And hopes for independent space launch capability from the island of Hainan were particularly high as the island was a centre of extensive construction for a space centre. Even programs against elements of Chinese culture deemed reactionary, such as foot binding and Millenarian Buddhist sects were often couched in terms condemning them as "earthbound" when China's destiny was "heavenwards" as the propaganda programs proclaimed.
One of the major hallmarks of the Chinese feelings of confidence and pride were in its growing rivalry with the Greater Indian Commonwealth, no longer feeling like a simple attachment to the Cold War that many regarded as at first, a contest primarily between the two halves of the English speaking world that had escaped the direct harm of the war. In this cold war between old world moderation, liberalism, and commonwealthism and new-world radicalism, communism, and republicanism[2], the Chinese public increasingly felt that the Republic had a responsibility to help the world achieve freedom, particularly the rest of Asia. It was not enough for the Americans and Russians to provide a guiding example, China had to take the trust invested into it as a permanent Security Council member and use it to advance the ideals laid out by Doctor Sun, Chairman Cheng, and the United Nations Charter[3].
The Chinese rivalry with India has its roots in the Kuomintang and CCP[4]'s support for the radical sections of the INC and the burgeoning Indian Communist movement, including Europhobic radicals such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Lakshmi Saghal who would eventually break with the Anti-Japanese and Anti-Hindutva united front as soon as the war was over to launch the Indian Civil war following the victory of the INC over the All-India-Forward bloc in the first post-war elections. In a war that cost the lives of more than three million people and brought fresh devastation to a Bengal still bearing the scars of the Hindutva uprising, Bose was forced to flee to China and proclaim a communist government in exile in the northeast centred around Assam, protected by the People's Revolutionary Red Army of China and rough terrain in an inversion of the flight of the MacArthurite dictatorship and the Greek Kingdom to Cuba and Crete.
Soong Qingling and Chen Duxiu's decision to support Bose's government as the legitimate government of India irrevocably shattered the accord they had with Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhhbai Patel, while the decision to back the insurgents also cost the INC left significant support in the Commonwealth's parliament, discrediting Nehru's attempt to come to an understanding with the Indian communists and emboldening the liberals to ban Comintern affiliated movements in both politics and organised labour and ushering in the great Indian red scare.
Indian Soldiers near the border of Indian Dispur
Under Patel's governance, Nehru's plans for a highly regulated mixed economy was largely scrapped in favour of a liberalised pro-investment economy built around exports to raise capital to build industry and import educators to build the basis of a modern economy. While landowners were encouraged to make some concessions to the "land gift" movement and to participate in voluntary land reform, large-scale involuntary land reform was abandoned as a project while industrialisation projects aimed at providing the basis for a strong Indian army were undertaken to arm the country against a return by Bose or an assault from Zhongjing. In essence, being recognised as the start of the Cold War's Asian theatre in earnest and final fission in the post-colonial order in Asia between its Liberal and Socialist wings following the defeat of its Futurist sectors.
India would respond to the news of Chinese nuclear tests with alarm and order significant investment into an Indian response, while border skirmishes over disputed territories in the Himalayas would only solidify the Sino-Indian divide. While their regional allies, such as Korea and Japan in the North or Iran to the west, or Siam and Oceania in the south and Arabia to the west, grew stronger, the two rising powers asserted increasingly self-directed foreign policy aimed at confronting the other as rivals for influence in the global south.
With a Chinese sense of superior strength gained from developing its first nuclear device in 1956 and its first thermonuclear device in 1960, the Indian program to get a nuclear weapon ready by 1960 and a thermonuclear device by 1964 was conducted with a profound sense of vulnerability, especially in the age of mostly bomber delivered nuclear weapons meaning that Indian weapons would have to cross large stretches of largely low-value territory to reach Chinese population centres, while most of India's population was in easy reach.
This drove the decision to engage in a proactive "rollback" doctrine as opposed to the earlier thesis of Containment preferred in Europe, seeing it as an absolute priority to keep Soviet Russia, Red America, and Communist China from encircling India. Active commitments of Indian troops to aid the governments of Malaysia and Siam in crushing communist insurgencies were already underway, and India would make the controversial decision to dispatch Indian soldiers to aid in the destruction of communist-backed insurgencies in Algeria and East Africa during the dominionisation of the continent.
Rather infamously, Indian intelligence would prove instrumental in the 1956 coup in the South Philippines, joining forces with the FBU and Oceania to oust the country's first ever Muslim president in favour of a military dictatorship due to last more than thirty-eight years until its dismantlement in 1994 in response to his efforts to build a unified, progressive, but non-aligned People's Commonwealth through negotiations with the North.
Indian Guru Temples, often linked to upper caste groups, would also form a means of soft power, promoting Indian forms of esotericism in foreign communities and taking the often controversial step of not only accepting but actively seeking converts, particularly from those who felt uprooted from the norm in the urbanisation of society or in nouveau riche classes clashing with established religions such as Catholicism or Sunnism more aligned with the traditional elite. This soft power was also promoted as a form of countering philosophy to pan-Asians and communism, a community formed around the teachings of primarily Saivite branches of Hinduism that intensely focused on the message of karma and cosmic justice, messages that resonated well with those who were newly wealthy in a changing world but faced criticism from local priests for materialistic displays.
Indochina had proven to be a major fulcrum of conflict as the Franco-British Union proved incapable of containing the Vietminh or the communist movement in Laos, leading to Catroux to announce a policy of "Vietnamisation" as the Empire was left on death's door with its ancestral holdings in the north stripped away and the catholic cliques within the South who could form a second base of reactionary thought being largely apathetic to the monarchy. With the Indian government stepping in to try and prop up the rump empire while China declared the north to be under its nuclear umbrella, the second phase of the Indochina wars would have to be fought in a largely indirect manner, alongside a renewed wave of insurgency in Siam and Malaysia.
Southeast Asia had become a hotbed of war and conflict by the time the Worldmerge of 1962 began as the world entered its most tense period since the late thirties, heavily encouraged by the extremely hawkish governments at the reins of the world's major powers. With a preference for settling disputes by putsch, conflict, or revolution rather than compromise having become the norm, it is likely that only the threat of nuclear retaliation kept a third world war from breaking out in the decade even before interaction with The New Order began[5].
At the same time, Left Wing putschists installed themselves in Burma, forcing the government to flee to the western half of the country placed under India's protection while India promoted an anti-communist insurgency in Burma that in turn prompted the deployment of Comintern troops of the International Volunteer Army even as preparations were made for the invasion of Romania for "nationalist deviationism"[6]
All of this would only grow into a yet more complicated situation with the Worldmerge on the first of January, 1962. The introduction of another world with a vastly different political context also meant putting India and China on a collision course with a first-rate superpower that via glide travelling ships and aircraft from either the Home Islands or the Co-Prosperity Sphere Alliance system, could threaten both of their metropoles in short order. It also brought into contact with new political conflicts, such as the ongoing insurgencies in Malaysia and the Philippines, the western insurrection brewing in the New Order's China, and the division between the Democratic Federative Republic of (West) India, the Free People's Republic of (East) India, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.[7]
Both recognised that Japan was a deeply dangerous opponent, with the IJN being able to destroy both of their fleet assets in short order and possessing orders of magnitude more nuclear weapons at the ready in case of all-out war as well as a more modern military capable of significantly greater degrees of power projection and a larger economy than both combined. But whereas the Indian government took a more cautious approach, Gong Peng of China endeavoured to engage in a war of patriotic liberation to match her Soviet counterparts to the north, hoping to reclaim as much of the territory of the other China as she could.
However, Western China was both less developed and up against a significantly larger chunk of the former nation's population than Eastern Russia, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere kept its armed forces in tighter shape than the Unity Pact. Similarly, the VOSCOM kept fewer troops suited for the type of warfare over Central China that would follow in Western China than they had ready in Eastern Europe. While Xinjiang, Tibet, Southern Qinghai, and Xikang were easy enough to integrate while absorbing Long Yun's western insurrection and Guizhou, the incursion into Sichuan, Mongolia, and Gansu proved significantly more difficult than expected as the NRA was deployed to serve as anvils to the IJA's hammer.
While the NRA was not able to match the PRRA in combat, it was able to buy time for the IJA to make its counterattacks or draw up further reinforcements from deeper in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Similarly, the perceived Communist threat had stiffened the resolve of an army propagandised against Communism for years, particularly with the heavy American and Soviet presence in the incursion. Whereas the RK Moskowien government was widely despised as a settler colonial puppet state, the client government of Nanjing had enough legitimacy to not immediately disintegrate on contact after years of normalisation of the status quo.
As the operational advance started to bog down in the face of poor transport infrastructure heading eastwards and the rapidly increasing population density of the territory they were attempting to capture as they reached farther east as well as the deployment of East Indian, Manchurian, Thai, and Indonesian Troops. Increasing rates of attrition in the European sector of the Eurasian war were also starting to diminish the amount of force that could be fed into the meatgrinder, and a nuclear redline was established sooner rather than later, While the National Revolutionary Army had not performed well, it had survived, even if the war had revealed deep-seated issues with loyalty to Nanjing and endemic corruption issues that saw it suffer disproportionate losses in the face of Red Army assault or defences, with morale issues often leading to whole brigades defecting at a time until emergency pay raises were offered[8]
While both sides claimed victory, the Sphere had retained the bulk of the territory of its second most important member and had demonstrated that its half of its own iteration of China could be protected. The conflict's outcome provided enough of a boost to Ikeda Hayato's clout within the Taisei Yokusankai to push his particular vision of technocratic developmentalism forward when coupled with his decisive action to quell the emergencies in the Philippines and Malaysia.
Indochina, however, proved to be more resilient, with Ho Chi Minh's rebels soon receiving substantial aid from his counterpart as well as the Chinese government, leading to a strange form of accord between the AFS and the CPS regarding the Vietnam war while the USA of the New Order officially opposed both, but retained an observational presence meant to ensure that human rights were being respected and that a neutral arbiter remained. Even more unusually, out of deeply cynical realpolitik, the German government also decided to send some support to the North Vietnamese government in the hopes that prolonging the conflict would kill as many Asians as possible.
While the understanding between New Order Tokyo and Red may London was tepid and largely only applied in Vietnam, with the two still coming to a major confrontation regarding alliance installation of nuclear weapons in Australia and sphere nuclear weapons in New Caledonia, it was perhaps a presage of the Sphere's later role as a tiebreaker and Japan's more than half century long process of slowly drifting away entirely from the Nazi regime.
Ikeda would also make one of the first major visits from a non-America New Order side official to the Red May side, starting a charm offensive with the United States of Insulindia that sought to maintain neutrality in the Cold War. Tacitly keeping mentions of the Romusha system that he was working on replacing quiet, Hayato sought to charm Insulindia with offers of a more independent foreign policy and protection from both the communist North and capitalist South as well as offer major investment, preemptively seeking to outbid Helmut Schmidt's own offers to Insulindia predicated on the Third Reich having no imperial ambitions over the east indies. Similarly, the members of the Yamato family in exile that had rejected the Socialist Republic's offers of renunciation of title in exchange for permission to remain in Japan in Siam, Oceania, and other locales were invited to come to the Japan of the New Order and live in their ancestral lands once again.
The Empire, while also looking towards some degree of normalisation with the great powers of the Red May Side, also engaged in talks with secondary powers such as both the United Arab Kingdoms, the United Kingdom of Egypt, Sudan, and Cyrenaica, the Socialist Council Republic of Turkiye, and the Democratic Republic of Iran. Born of an interest in oil, chromite, and other significant resource deals as well as access to their markets for export products, Hayato's clique saw value in the region's growing middle class[9] as a purchasing bloc for the ever-growing export-focused desires of the CPS' major economies. Part of the plan to build solidarity with the National Federal Republic of China and revive the economy of Manchuria while also expanding the prosperity of Cantonia required giving them markets to export the products of a growing consumer industrial base and try to calm the growing labour movements and give ground to major strike actions and unionisation in these regions with the dividends of prosperity and strategic concessions[10]
The Kochikai, or Broad Pond Society, of the Taisei Yokusankai, was hoping for restraint in military spending in favour of efficiency and tightening the excesses of defence industry competition with crackdowns on corruption in the Zaibatsu. While falling short of outright nationalisations of all military industries, the program met its goals of providing major savings without impacting throughput in military spending while tactical investments helped to mollify the largest Japanese companies.
But perhaps Hayato's most famous speech was his Lunar effort announcement. To build pride in the country, Hayato also announced a doubling of spending on the Kaguya program, desiring to put a Japanese crew on the moon by the end of the decade. While he pointed out that it was only a sliver of the titanic mass of the Japanese Empire's yearly budget, he said that this program would return great dividends in electronic miniaturisation, rocket design, material sciences, and communications. Furthermore, it would radically advance the state of Japan's missiles to ensure her security more efficiently and allow for larger and more sophisticated satellites to be designed that could revolutionise everything from television to weather forecasting.
In response, the Indian Prime Minister Rajagopalachari ordered the expansion of Indian space efforts including independent launch capability, while Premier Gong Peng personally attended the launch of the very first Chinese Satellite from Hainan.
...
Author's Notes:
[1]: A common Cold War era refrain attempts to equivocate Japanese Concordism's brand of Pan Asian Futurism with Chinese Communnism's brand of Pan Asian Futurism when they're quite separate, with the former having fully embraced Marinetti's thesis of war as a beautiful and sacred thing to cleanse the spirit with relentless transformation into an industrial soldier society and also violent Anti-Europeanism. Meanwhile, the latter is more about progress and challenging reactionary traditions and building the future Asia deserves without imperialism but (preferably) without chauvinism towards Europe. In other words this is a bit of Blue bloc brainworms.
[2]: The fact that "Commonwealthism" is simply a more Germanic way of saying the same concept as "Republicanism" is obfuscated by the fact that the Guardian is an FBU Media outlet that while tied to the Labour-SFIO party, is ultimately not inclined to embrace revolution.
[3] This article is essentially erasing the more internationalist or Tridemist critical wings of the Chinese communist movement and is also trying to bury the fact that the Chinese government was strongly in favour of Cominternism, while overattributing the value it attached to the heavily divided UN.
[4]: As in OTL, "Chinese Communist Party" is an incorrect translation as opposed to "Communist Party of China".
[5]: The author is engaging in a lot of presentism here. In the early 60s, with most nuclear weapons having to be delivered by bombers and missiles being clunky and immature as a technology, mutually assured destruction was not really a coherent strategic thesis, and the fact that nuclear weapons were never used strategically in Reds! also diminished awareness of how destructive all out thermonnuclear war would really be. The main thing holding back the tanks is that even a purely conventional third world war would be more destructive than the already apocalyptic second world war.
[6]: Romania's Nationalist wing of the communist party took over and sought to withdraw Romania's communist party from the authority of the Comintern and also recall all Romanian troops in the RIVA without leaving the Vladivostok Compact. Fuelled by resentment among many towards Romania being treated especially harshly in the JDPON administrations with nationalist sentiment being frowned on even more than it was in East Germany, North Italy, Japan, Turkiye, or Hungary. Citing the fact that such sentiment was encouraged and even praised in Iran, Korea, and China, the Romanians hoped to reverse the internationalisation course of the Comintern. In response, the Presiding Committee of the Comintern declared them to be cringe and ordered them stomped into the dirt when they tried to arrest a Romanian RIVA commander who rejected their orders on charges of treason. The FBU and co generally lionise the Romanian National Communists, despite the Alliance of Free States also being a vast internationalist project disdainful of whatever it deems to be backwards parochialism.
[7]: I'm starting with Pakistan already formed and Dange's Indian Communists already being the West Indian Prime Minister circa 1962 in lieu of TNO's Indian content coming anytime soon. West India has a rough understanding with the OFN, which invests into it in order to use West India as a desperately needed export market and an equally desperately needed ally of convenience on the continent, but East India had the larger share of India's existing iron and coal mines as well as being more industrialised to start off with, though with a smaller manpower pool. West India basically keeps the Australian economy alive with its importation of iron and coal in exchange for luxury crops, precious materials, and rarer mineral resources. Similarly, an American desire to not look bad next to Japan, as well as have a stable partner to launch operations into Central Asia and have an even tangential presence in the Islamic world forces it to try and keep up with Japan in a race to invest. Pakistan is by contrast (along with Sri Lanka), a German client state as part of Hitler's policy of support for Islamist and Indo-Aryanist groups to try and undermine Italian, Japanese, and American interests and also to shield its precious ally Iran from India.
[8]: The writer is somewhat understating things, the NRA was on the verge of giving way and opening the path to Guangdong until an entire combined CPS army group arrived to shore up the line in the South and a nuclear strike was ordered on Long Yun's position.
[9]: Those who know my politics know that I do not regard the middle class as a scientifically valid categorisation of social strata. I'd call it a growth of the purchasing power of the higher income sections of the proletariat and the petit and moyennes bourgeoisie through concessions wrung from the Haut-Bourgeoisie due to the period of post-worldmerge boom prosperity. But fundamentally the richer sections of the proles and peasantry do not share class interests with the Petit and Moyennes Bourgeoisie, so lumping them together based on income bracket doesn't hold much scientific value.
[10]: "Damn the proles got hands. Better pay them off before they ask Madame Gong to send the tanks."
The most unrealistic part for me is that there exists an India, somewhere out there in the wide wide realm of the infinite, that gives a damn about the North-East Region. Apparently enough so that someone from there even became PM!
All jokes aside, very interesting update. Unfortunately it seems TNO Japan not only sticks around but sees massive growth as well. At least they didn't retake all of China though...
The most unrealistic part for me is that there exists an India, somewhere out there in the wide wide realm of the infinite, that gives a damn about the North-East Region. Apparently enough so that someone from there even became PM!
All jokes aside, very interesting update. Unfortunately it seems TNO Japan not only sticks around but sees massive growth as well. At least they didn't retake all of China though...
[9]: Those who know my politics know that I do not regard the middle class as a scientifically valid categorisation of social strata. I'd call it a growth of the purchasing power of the higher income sections of the proletariat and the petit and moyennes bourgeoisie through concessions wrung from the Haut-Bourgeoisie due to the period of post-worldmerge boom prosperity. But fundamentally the richer sections of the proles and peasantry do not share class interests with the Petit and Moyennes Bourgeoisie, so lumping them together based on income bracket doesn't hold much scientific value.
If I'm understanding the wiki articles right (always a tricky business), "Moyennes Bourgeoisie" refers to Bourgeoisie who come into their wealth not by direct ownership of capital, but by "white-collar" professions. Think of someone like an extremely highly-paid lawyer. They tend to be wealthier than the "small businessmen" that tend to make up the Petite Bourgeoisie but not so much as the capitalist or aristocratic moguls that usually form the Grande Bourgeoisie. Think something like "lower-upper class".
I'm less certain on "Haut Bourgeoisie". It appears to be similar to a Moyennes in that it refers to a certain form of lower-upper/upper-middle class group whose profession is more white-collar in nature, but they achieve that position and (by extension) wealth despite not being nobility or something? The wiki page doesn't seem to be very helpful here.
I'm less certain on "Haut Bourgeoisie". It appears to be similar to a Moyennes in that it refers to a certain form of lower-upper/upper-middle class group whose profession is more white-collar in nature, but they achieve that position and (by extension) wealth despite not being nobility or something? The wiki page doesn't seem to be very helpful here.
The general example I've heard for Haut Bourgeoisie is factory owners. It refers to those who own enough of the means of production/capital to live in luxury without working at all while still having ever more wealth accrue off their passive income/investments.
Map of the core territories of Germany, including the Ordenstaat (condominium with France), Poland, the Netherlands, and Czechia
Excerpt from "Inside Speer's Reich, a Full Account" by Christian Ingrao (RMR), David Glantz (TNO), Sabine Andrivon-Milton (RMR), Beatrice Heuser (RMR), Sahar Nasr (RMR), Martin van Creveld (TNO), and Steven Zaloga (TNO), Published by the OFAN institute of Teutonic Military Studies, 2022
OOC Note: OFAN stands for Organisation of Free Allied Nations, the merger of the OFN and AFS. Though due to its sheer size it's subdivided into regional alliances and partnerships that do not necessarily have overlapping commitments to each other to avoid the complications that arise when you have countries in Southeast Asia influencing security decisions in Western Europe.
It is opposed by the REVCON which is abbreviated from the Concordat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Associate Worker's States of the Communist International to use the name of the treaty, or Revolutionary Concordat for Short, of which VOSCOM; Vladivostok Compact (short for the Compact of Military Cooperation, Friendship, and Mutual Aid between Proletarian Nations, signed in Vladivostok), is the most famous branch of as it includes much of the big names and was the branch that fought the European Axis in world war two.
Both are formally part of the United Nations which remains in force and remains explicitly opposed to Fascism, Futurism, and Nazism in its documentation as part of the legacy of the organisation being founded as an Anti-Axis organisation. It does open up to the Co-Prosperity sphere however, due to the TNO CPS being so very different from the Reds one and the question of whether by the 60s, Greater Japan is really all that different from the FBU, being legitimately hard to debunk.
The Einheitspakt and Triumvirate become the Eisenfront (or Iron Front) or more formally the Signatories of the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Unity of the Sovereign Nations and Peoples of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas to use the name of the founding document, most often abbreviated to EISFRO or IROFRO or just not abbreviated further past Iron/Eisenfront.
It forms the Coalition of States with the CPS and some countries as an explicit counter to the United Nations where it instead bans Communism, Syndicalism, and Anarchism in its founding documents. However the CPS' member states maintain membership in both the UN and the CS, while the AFS and OFN take membership purely to make the organisation run less coherently simply by breaking the circlejerk and having the delegates sent be brazen anti-fascists who use their speaking time to polemicise.
The institute of Teutonic Military Studies primarily focuses on TNO German and German allies military history and analysis, out of the IFBU military fearing that there might be an information gap relative to the Communists who were much less inclined to believe what they were being told by their Germans regarding the nature of the German army.
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The Greater Germanic Reich was the ogre of the New Order's Europe, a regime that had directly killed more than a hundred million people in merely thirty years across three continents and indirectly was responsible for even more suffering and would have gladly done it again but worse. It was the most monstrous regime on Earth, an edifice to cruelty and everything hateful about humanity, the culmination of all the worst parts of the European philosophical and political tradition into a totalising nightmare of genocide and hate. It was a land of children born of a lebensborn program that once started nobody was willing to even pump the brakes on no matter how much of a strain the increasingly bottom heavy demographics of Germany were as school systems were overwhelmed with masses of youngsters. It was a land of war that maintained a vast army to remind the world that it was ready to kill again and only geography so far had stopped it from further conquests.
It was a profitable regime, turning its cruel system of extermination into a means of mass producing cheap goods by funneling undesirable into Burgundy, its joint Venture with France managed by the SS, to be worked to death in 180 days as a form of capital punishment for severe crimes of all sorts; property, racial, sexual, moral. Hundreds of thousands were shipped by train into Himmler's little venture, the only thing that would come out is money, well, money, physiological, cheap goods for the state and consumers, and that famous brand of suspiciously labelled ash-based fertiliser everybody knew better than to ask too many questions about.
Africans, Slavs, Romani, Jews, Freemasons, Esperantists, the Disabled, the Queer, Communists, Liberals, Trade Unionists, Rebels, Anyone who had done a crime worthy of death or were deemed to deserve it by existing and being "extraneous" were sent to Burgundy to die. Perhaps more than a million every year, arriving by train and never being seen again. Not in the black heart of Europe's economic engine. And what of the people who invested into this monstrous machine? This horrible furnace of human life and the abattoir of suffering it produced? Well, it made them a lot of money and the workers there were expected to be crushed anyway, so hardly any of them cared.
And when countries participating in the Burgundian program could receive shares in Burgundian enterprises with labourers as well as cash, why even Social Democratic Sweden found it...appealing to send those slated to be sterilised by its eugenics program into the furnace heart of nazism to die. Then they started sending the Sami, then their own Jews, then more and more. All in the name of good relations with Germany and keeping the Swedish economy solvent. All to keep Hitler happy and prevent Germany from deciding that the "eventually" on its timetable for the integration of Sweden into the Germanic Reich was actually "Now".
All members of the EINPAK partook, not just the French co-creators of Burgundy. The British partook, the Danish Partook, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Irish, the Finns, the Iranians, the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the Hungarians and even the Swiss, while collaborators like the Aryan Brotherhood sold their own countrymen in exchange for weapons.
The result was a country that despite all of its economic woes was still functioning, and following the west Russian crisis, was now solidly under the leadership of Albert Speer as the successor to Hitler. While the country had a burgeoning issue with gerontocracy as the Old Nazis clung to power until death, Speer had elevated some fresh blood to positions to displace older rivals he saw as potentially threatening his plans for the reich, including his efforts to break its present diplomatic isolation. Germany was now the master of all of non-Russian Europe and nearly all of Africa, thanks to the Triumvirate joining his cause, but it was also a despised pariah state.
The Communists and Liberals didn't agree on very much, but they did agree on hating the Fascists and Nazis. Even worse, the very existence of East and West Germany on the other side provided a means to threaten the fatherland itself. Not just in terms of the air and naval threat, but also in terms of spies that could be easily slipped into Germany by arriving at points deemed suitable for entry, making their way to Germany and sometimes even masquerading themselves as their alters; often after kidnapping or killing them. It certainly kept the Gestapo busy, endlessly looking for any hint of spies within the Reich.
A fresh red scare was a good way to try and rile the population into compliance, telling them of the threat of communist and Jewish infiltrators, but it could also be seen as a sign of weakness, especially after having to concede most of RK Moskowien. On the other hand, Moskowien was always the problem child of the RKs, industrializing it posed a potential risk, the Russian population was restless, raids from the east were constant, and most settlers preferred much closer to home RKs such as Ostland or Ukraine, or the warmer and more pleasant Crimean Peninsula and Caucasus.
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However, the results for the Wehrmacht was nothing short of embarrassing for the second-string divisions based in Eastern Europe. Far from the elite that would face the OFN and AFS in South Africa, the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe had been allowed to decay to a shell of itself. Following the West-Russian War, it was believed by the OKW that Russia was finished and that there would never again be a serious threat from the East for the foreseeable future. Equipment ratings were marked down, with well-trained officers being transferred to Africa, West Asia, and to the borders with the Triumvirate's sphere of influence, leaving behind garrison soldiers primarily meant to deal with raiders and uprisings. The doctrine was similarly reoriented towards shock and awe to scare away Russian bandits crossing the Permian line, with no serious expectations of having to deal with first-rate combat units even if the Russian warlord period was resolved for at least thirty years.
The typical RK Moskowien division, even when hastily reinforced with activated reserves following the aerial clashes in 1962, received earlier, surplus marks of equipment and had low priority for modern forms of gear such as Night Vision systems, new forms of composite armour, high grade armour piercing shells, and high quality anti-tank munitions. While the tank raiders of Gorky were a continual nuisance, the T-55 tanks that emerged from there were generally able to be dealt with by fairly basic HEAT or APCR rounds and would shy away from major confrontation to preserve numbers, this promoted a sense of complacency with regards to armoured shock, especially with the near total air supremacy that the Luftwaffe had enjoyed in European Russia for the past fifteen years.
Though the backbone of Speidel's forces would be stiffened by soldiers moved from the european borders with the Triumvirate, the bulk of the formations expected to attack into Permian Russia and defend RK Moskowien were scarcely better equipped than their predecessors in the West Russian War, and significantly more poorly trained in what was to be a repeat of history. One where there would be no repeat of Speidel's miracle on the Volga or the breaking of the Russian United Front.
Entire corps were demolished at a time by the VOSCOM crushing one formation after the other with the German army trading on average, at a ratio of two to one against its favour, with tank losses being a humiliating four to one loss ratio as T-60s and MBT-25s took out Leopard Tanks by the bushel load, with their superior composite armour absorbing shots in return. In terms of mobility, their engines raced around the Wehrmacht's panzerkorps whose power systems had fallen considerably behind in output in an effort to conserve parts and a perception of an end to the era of rapid manoeuvre warfare outside of Africa and the Middle East, where the SS' more mobile Wolf Tanks were preferred. Instead being built according to the doctrine of "re-deployable lines" to better take and hold territory in eastern Russia and make a brutal crossing through the rough Pyrenees, Alpine, and Caucasian mountain terrain separating the Einheitspakt from the Triumvirate.
Especially terrible for the Panzerkorps was that the Communist tanks could fire on the move with no loss in accuracy by what they did not understand was a two-plane gyroscopic stabiliser, allowing for the enemy's tanks such a massive advantage as to be borderline incomprehensible to the panzertruppe. The battle of Soldatskoe in the Voronzeh Oblast where only one hundred and twenty-one VOSCOM tanks of the 101st Soviet tank division of the Ukrainian Front knocked out five hundred and seventy-two Werhmacht armoured fighting vehicles to no permanent losses of their own in a three-hour-long rampage over more than forty-eight kilometres in the night of the 18th of June 1963, pausing only at the sunrise because "We kicked so much ass we were running low on ammunition" in the words of the newly minted tank ace Anatoly Cherdenko.
Fitted with night vision systems, the T-60s and MBT-25s of the 101st were able to freely engage virtually blind Leopards that lacked any such devices and were firing entirely blind at an enemy engaged in "Mongolian drive-by shootings" as the tactic was cheekily referred to by the men and women of the division.
...
The attempt to stop Lin Biao's Moscowbound offensive from Kirov had also resulted in the loss of thousands of armoured vehicles by the end, as Speidel's formations were mauled not only by the Compact's international tank divisions but by heavy anti-tank firepower from mechanised infantry and the lethal attentions of Compact airpower. Airpower that included a secret weapon that would prove to be a terror of German Infantry Transports, Armoured Cars, and Logistical Vehicles, in the form of the Mi-22 "Hellhound" and the AH-1 "Barn Owl" Attack Transport and Gunship helicopters to which the German army and air force had nothing comparable nor sufficient counters in place to.
While German air defence forces were, when present, more than adequate and capable though often helter-skelter in an effort to rush out formations to a sector that had long since ceased having to worry about airpower up until a year ago, there was an issue. German air defence capabilities were oriented towards countering fixed-wing aircraft; unready for the on-demand firepower that attack helicopters represented or their ability to suddenly pop out of concealment and open fire upon ground formations before retreating. A capability that was augmented by a surprise that had been in intensively secretive development for years, the much-celebrated if somewhat overstated deployment of Wire Guided anti-tank missiles launched from the helicopters to supplement their more typical HEAT rocket and autocannon barrages that claimed many a light vehicle.
Though their role in tank hunting is best remembered in popular circles, their greatest effect was on the logistics vehicles that were generally left insufficiently protected from helicopter attack due to the arrangements of air defence being made with only bombers and CAS planes in mind. Very often, a trio of Barn Owls or Hellhounds would emerge from cover upon word of an EINPAK or even Triumvirate logistical convoy entering their area of operation, unload a large barrage of rockets in a close strafe, and sweep any stragglers aside with nose gunfire before darting back to safety with many tonnes of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts left to burn on the roadside long before flak companies or interceptors could arrive.
This would greatly and negatively affect the logistical capacity of the Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, and German allies operating in western Russia, leaving convoys too paranoid to make deliveries without commitments of flakpanzers and "flak tracks"; as the conversions of old half-tracks to fit anti-aircraft artillery as a cheap means of providing peace of mind against night witch bombing only to be pressed into frontline service came to be nicknamed by Compact troops; to their protection..More skilled and better-trained troops would have to wait precious extra days to receive sufficient supplies to carry out their orders, especially important as the complexity of the logistical demands of the Eisenfront troops increased geometrically with every new country committing to the "defence against bolshevism", all with differing marks of equipment and materiel and in the case of the Triumvirate; generally outright incompatible.
By contrast, the Vladivostok Compact's military forces had been honed by decades of standardisation of parts, while American, Chinese, or Soviet formations may often use different vehicles, their underlying technology was kept rigorously identical so that replacement components would be easily fitted in. Similarly, by usage of the Glide, the Compact advance enjoyed a logistical advantage by having the terrain of Red Mayside Eastern europe to fall back on and move their supplies where the enemy could not interdict them, giving Lin Biao unparalleled freedom of movement even with the often dilapidated state of Western Russia infrastructure.
...
The Luftwaffe had also been savaged, with its inadequacies revealed in the bombing campaign being exploited ruthlessly by repeated flights of air superiority missions that made full bore usage of the edge in Communist Bloc missiles and radar to win multiple aerial victories at greater range than they could be responded to at. While German aircraft could make for potent opponents when the fighting got close thanks to skillfully designed airframes and powerful engines, the issue was getting there in the first place as avionics superiority proved itself a decisive component to a modern airforce. The lack of cooperative training with the Triumvirate also complicated matters, as Italian, Turkish, and Iberian aircraft were generally familiar with German, French, and British aerial doctrine only in the context of an enemy to oppose and would often refuse to share areas of operation to avoid potential incidents.
German "cargo gunship" aircraft, made from retrofitted propellor driven cargo planes equipped with a large array of broadside weapons found to be highly effective at suppressing rebel or partisan forces would be deployed in frontline combat action against a peer army for the first time. Including both the larger "Goliath" and the smaller "Hermann" model cargo planes, the latter armed primarily with three 7.62 mm rotary machine guns and twin 30mm autocannons for anti-infantry work and the former with a 15 cm cannon, a 10.5 cm cannon, twin 40 mm bofors autocannons, and a pair of rotary 20 mm Gatling cannons as a more general purpose fire support craft. The sheer audacity of the concept of flying such a craft at capable air defences did manage to catch a number of Compact formations off guard, who had heard of such things being used by the Alliance of Free States to suppress insurgents in Africa, but never expected anyone would try such a thing on a standing army's troops even with the cover of night.
However, self-propelled anti-aircraft systems such as the ZSU-37-2, the then still experimental Gas Ignition 23mm Rotary cannon equipped Type-65 as well as widely distributed MANPADS would take much of the sting off of these attacks once they had been properly adjusted to. Though countermeasures such as chaff and flares were abundant on such converted aircraft, cannon fire seldom cared for attempts to baffle radar and infrared lock-on and once lit up by infrared spotlights, these aircraft would frequently find themselves shot out of the sky.
Far more effective were German tactical ballistic and surface to surface cruise missiles. While accuracy, as was often the case for long range missiles of the period, often left something to be desired, they were difficult to intercept and relatively cheap to lob en masse at the enemy. As per Heer doctrine, they were targeted not at mobile formations that they had little chance of hitting with significant impact but instead at sensitive logistical points such as munitions dumps or command and communication centres as well as airfields and railhubs. Terror bombardment of civilian population centres was also frequent and intense, with Moscow alone suffering roughly 1,521 impacts by V5 missiles before the cessation of hostilities.
Attempted strategic bombardment was not quite as successful, as large bombers proved to be perilously vulnerable to interception unless given exorbitant escort and extensive SEAD operations ahead of time, something that went both ways. Tu-95 and B-54 bombers were vulnerable to the latest generation of German and Italian air defence missiles and interceptors, and would quickly resort to primarily cruise missile delivery systems as delivery of gravity bombs proved too difficult a task for too little reward, especially with a need to conserve planes for other conflicts and in era where large aircraft were the primary means of delivering nuclear weapons.
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At sea however, the Kriegsmarine had long been a favoured child of Hitler's policy to exert Germany as a world power, and had held its own surprisingly well, maintaining control over its home waters even when Leningrad had been retaken. In the tight confines of the baltic, Aircraft Carriers were more of a liability than an asset, and naval combat would frequently have to be decided at gun range where old World War Two and 1950s vintage ships would give one last hurrah. Soviet Admiral Ushakov class battleships, some of the last all gun battleships to ever be built in the Red May World, kept in service for a potentially violent crossing of Skattegat would engage with the German Hannover class ships in a bizarre, latter-day classic gun brawl, trading superheavy ultrahigh velocity long 460mm rounds with 483mm shells in a vicious knife fight to prevent these first German battleships from bombarding the positions of VOSCOM troops in the baltic. While the battle of Krondstadt was indecisive, the sinking of the heavy cruisers Novosibirsk and Grapes of Wrath in exchange for the Light Cruiser Emden is sometimes taken to be a German victory.
Simultaneously however, in the missile conflicts, the Leningrad would successfully sink the Battlecruiser Wikinger and the destroyers Z-983 and Z-671 and claim a gunkill on the Frigate F-152 in a storied engagement at Beryozovye. Many more ships would be sunk across the Baltic and Caspian Fronts of the Eurasian war, but the need to commit more craft to the Pacific would limit the VOSCOM's willingness to "go for broke" in the words of Admiral Nance Youngblood, particularly after the response to the detonation of a nuclear weapon on compact troops at Pskov and the resulting nuclear strike on the German Missile Battleship Otto der Grosse.
Submarines would not play a substantial role in the conflict for the shallow waters of the Caspian and the Baltic Sea, but would make more of an impact in the arctic front of the naval conflict, with submarine-on-submarine conflict theories finding themselves quickly put to the test. Sonar detectability and passive sensitivity were rapidly found to be overwhelmingly the most important quality in an engagement between submarines, with the first submarine to make enough noise to be detected usually losing the duels fought beneath the arctic summer waters to exert control over the waterways, with the Kriegsmarine wishing to destroy Communist bloc shipping capabilities in the white sea and open the waterways to submarine-launched cruise missile bombardment while the Compact sought to screen its transports and ward away any potential nuclear delivery systems.
The arctic conflict would also see some of the only carrier actions of the western theatre of the Eurasian War, with the Hawai'i Jeju, and Spartacus as well as the Soviet Carriers Berkut and Komintern facing the German Carrier Ernst Lehmann, Max Immelmann, the German Light Carrier Adler, and the British Carrier Mordred and the Light Carrier Bonny. The ensuing battle of Novaya Zemlya would see the sinking of the Bonny and the Adler, and the Immelmann burning on all decks and only barely managing to avoid sinking itself, while the Spartacus would have to ground itself ashore to prevent sinking. While the surface warships of the Kriegsmarine could trade well with its counterparts, its naval aviation left much to be desired.
…
By the later months of the Eurasian War, the Iron Front had been properly formed and Schoerner had arrived with Amedeo Guillet, the architect of Italian victory in East Africa to stabilise the situation. This time arriving with the latest mark of vehicles, vast reserves of fresh soldiers and modern materiel, and facing a compact starting to overextend as it plunged into Minsk and Kyiv as well as having the resources of a Fascist Europe united in widespread panic, the conflict would get even harsher.
First-rate divisions of the "Europakoalition" crashed into the Vladivostok Compact as winter froze the terrain solid, Schoerner's typical disciplinary methods being inflicted upon his own soldiers as he deemed one set of Speidel's commanders after another as having failed the fatherland. Literal decimation of units deemed derelict in their duties cost the lives of tens of thousands of German soldiers, but was deemed a worthy sacrifice in the name of discipline, while the hollowed out formations were kludged together into "combat groups" and thrown back into the fire to buy time.
With the farthest west formations of the compact having reached Lviv and Riga, there was serious concern as to whether the thousand year reich had come to its end. Many had come to expect that the rotten German empire would finally collapse as the communist troops saw the black sea in their sights and drew up plans to press into non-soviet Europe. However, the unexpected turnaround of attempted invasion into Iran, Caucasia, and Afghanistan as well as the reverses in East Asia were starting to slow down the Compact's time tables and munitions stockpiles were growing to be a serious concern.
It was the greatest offensive of all time in terms of ground gained, but even the vast resources of the Compact had limits when fighting what amounted to a world war across the borders of what were once Russia and China. The desperate commitment of vast counterattack waves hit hard at lines that had yet to be solidified in ground too hard to dig into, with formations deemed beyond saving from their earlier losses utilised for outright human wave attacks without regard for casualties. Often these would take the form of outright bayonet charges, as was seen in the battle of Riga where more than twenty thousand German soldiers would fix bayonets, emerge from preprepared underground fortifications and swarm forwards with a cry of "Deutschland Uber Alles!" and "Heil Hitler!" to overrun the 889th American mechanised brigade, retaking key positions even at devastating personnel losses to themselves.
Apparated persons were often used for this purpose in particular, rounded up after being detected, given a uniform and weapon and then seen if they had enough training for more thoughtful service or only as usage as cannon fodder. Generally with blockade detachments of the SS at their heels, machine guns ready to scythe them down if they were seen going the wrong way without orders.
Such atrocities were accompanied by a new wave of barbaric reprisals against the uprisings that rose to fight the Fascist coalition's control over eastern Europe. Hennig von Tresckow, the so-called "humane face of the Wehrmacht", ordered the destruction of Krakow to pacify resistance with children forced to watch the executions of their parents before being dispersed across the Reich as slaves on his explicit order, far surpassing his original remit for pacifying the General Government. Upon the recapture of Lviv with the repulsing of Mongolian troops in the region, Schoerner ordered every single civilian who did not greet the heer with the Hitler salute immediately upon prompting summarily shot.
While German sympathetic accounts stress the viciousness of reprisals against German settlers and officials by oppressed civilians, it is the academic opinion of this account that such acts of revenge after decades of slavery deserve sympathy and pity, not condemnation by those who have never had to experience the effects of Generalplan Ost. And even at their most vicious and cruel, more mercy was shown to the German civilians by these partisans whose excesses, while not always restrained, were never considered permissible or laudable by the STAVKA of the Compact's intervention force. Discipline against reports of rape, looting, or civilian reprisal was quick and harsh, and an image of a professional red soldier was encouraged.
By contrast, Schoerner's first command upon taking over the situation was "Enough of Speidel's velvet glove nonsense. The iron fist is here to stay, crush anyone in our way and make sure that we never face the impertinence of the unruly slav ever again. Kill until they learn their place, rape until they keep their mouths shut, and burn until they know how good they have had it so far". The reprisals against resistance were so detestable as to personally shock even Francisco Franco who had ordered horrific atrocities against the Catalans, particularly towards the explicit endorsement of sexual violence and the wholesale slaughter or intentional traumatisation of children as a means of terror.
This account is not concerned with the tawdry pornography of lurid accounts of crimes against humanity, but more than six million civilians would be killed through a direct military massacre in just six months of see-sawing back-and-forth warfare over the contested terrain, more than ninety-five per cent of them at the hands of Fascist forces. While the military losses were staggering in the lower millions, the civilian death toll essentially shattered the demographics of many regions, leaving entire oblasts in RK Ukraine and Ostland devoid of indigenous peoples while millions who had enjoyed some meagre rights as conquered subjects were pressed into outright chattel slavery or serfdom and family units were outright destroyed. Historical sites were destroyed, and corpses, often little more than bleached skulls, would piled in grotesque pyramids before surviving villages as an explicit warning to those who resisted.
Unfortunately, the sheer desperation of the Iron Front counterattack, when cumulative with setbacks in Asia, was enough to force the Vladivostok compact to focus on evacuation of as many civilians into Russia as possible and drive it out of the Reichskommissariats of Ukraine and Ostland. While the Fascist coalition had suffered brutal casualties in the process, with its attentions fully undivided and the Japanese proving to be far stronger than anticipated, the Compact had to reconsider its priorities, especially as peripheral allies were having to do without the largesse of the primary powers.
However, as the enemy pressed back into RK Moskowien, starting to unleash the same brand of mass murder upon the civilians of Russia, Lin Biao's counteroffensive would drive them back from the gates of Leningrad. Enraged by what he had seen in the terrain he was fighting over, Lin Biao vowed to not let any further land fall into the hands of the Iron Front, and oversaw the destruction of Army Group North in the battle of Novgorod, with his troops even effecting the capture of Field Marshal Wolf Graf von Baudissinn, who had lost much of his stomach for the war after seeing the effects of Schoerner's commands in action.
Only the final appointment of Speer in the contentious election of the new Fuhrer and his consolidation of power to finally be granted access to nuclear weapons, a privilege restricted only to the Fuhrer by word of Hitler, did the conflict finally stop with the brief tactical nuclear exchange of the Summer of 1964. Ordered by a Speer concerned that the Wehrmacht could not affect another such recovery before the Compact spilled into central Europe and that if he had to call up any further reserves he would have to cancel his plans in South Africa, he made the decision to order the usage of German nuclear weapons at what he considered to be the decisive points of battle.
While at first only the largest, a 30 Megaton nuclear warhead detonated at Pskov, was reported, later analysis shows that dozens of small-scale tactical nuclear weapons including artillery and cruise missiles had been deployed, responded to with nuclear exchange in kind, decimating multiple Europakoalition corps while the Otto der Grosse was directly impacted with a hundred kiloton warhead delivered by cruise missile, making it clear that there was no nuclear supremacy in effect for either side. With the threat of further, strategic escalation now in play, at last Speer's allies virtually forced him into looking for terms with the spectre of annihilation hanging over them, with Mutti personally threatening to turn on Speer and attack with his Alpine divisions if they didn't back out of things sooner rather than later, and the alarm raised in the OFN and AFS would lead them to also request that the VOSCOM look for talks.
The Geneva conference mediated by multiple nonaligned powers that followed would settle a cold peace in the largest undeclared war in history. West Russia was free, but Ukraine, Ostland, and Caucasia would remain in chains.
"It's called the thousand year reich because it takes a thousand years to get to the fucking bathroom in the Volkshalle" - Anonymous
Albert Speer was the heir of the reich after nearly thirty years of rule by Adolf Hitler, and by the writ of the National Socialist Workers Party he was the master of a domain that stretched from Livonia to Antwerp and from the arctic circle to deepest Africa. His was the will that commanded an army of seven million men and his were the decrees that consigned millions to an early grave and only by his command could a nuclear arsenal meant to reduce all nations of the earth to ash could be used. And he was quite satisfied with his situation.
"Moskowien is no great loss in comparison to rectifying Mussolini's infantile defiance and tightening our hold on the actually productive territories." He said to the gathered men of his cabinet, the OKW, and the upper echelons of the SS, reviewing the withdrawal of German forces from great Russia and other strategic situations.
"Mein Fuhrer, this puts the grain belt of Ukraine and the Caucasian Oil Fields under serious threat." Kiesinger said before Speer waved him off.
"Our defensive lines are simpler and easier to construct now. And what did ruling over only a third of the Russians really give us besides headaches? Always one revolt or the other or one terrorist band or another. We will retake it, of course, but we can properly develop the Reichskommissariats in the east now, particularly with the Triumvirate now understanding the true enemy." His words were cold, calculated.
When Speer spoke, he had more of a diligent energy to him than the bursts and slumps of Hitler, for one thing he was scrutinising the mathematics and charts far more closely than the prior Fuhrer had in a long while, holding one of them up to his face for intent study.
"Are these reports regarding the strength of the Mujahedeen in India accurate?" He asked, looking towards not Helmut Schmidt, but Baldur von Schirarch to the former's clear irritation.
"I would never bring you false information mein Fuhrer." He smiled a crocodile's smile, speed rolling his eyes as he adjusted the lapels of his brown party uniform and placed the sheet he was staring at down.
"Regardless, I want something exciting to happen in our India sooner than later. We have tolerated the Bolshevik foothold in the greater portion of the Indian subcontinent for far too long and now with our hands freed in the near east we can address it properly." He ordered, nodding to Gehlen and Heydrich to make it happen.
"Mein Fuhrer, may I please bring up the matter of the political reforms promised? As far as I can tell the emancipation program for slaves is largely leaving the farmhands untouched and those are the-" Schmidt said before one look from the Architect cut him short.
"Largest portion of forced labour? Yes of course they are, that's the point. Do you think that the wine you like sipping grows itself? We must be realistic in our progress Herr Schmidt. Don't let your enthusiasm or your...father's heritage distract you from that fact." He said, once again rebuffing and dismissing his alleged Foreign Minister.
"But, mein fuhrer we promised!" Schmidt said before Erhadt brought a hand onto his shoulder and pulled him back.
"Not now, Helmut, we have other things to worry about, and this isn't your concern, Jewboy. You are foreign minister, you leave the economics to me." He said harshly through a whisper like scolding a child.
"Why do we even let this mongrel speak in this office?" Heydrich's almost offputtingly high pitched voice said with the plainest and bluntest of inflections.
"His father is a Jew, he is a Jew by blood if not belief. We should just shoot him and be done with it." Heydrich's words had the temperature of liquid nitrogen and the pleasantness of sandpaper. Enough to make Schmidt's soft face shiver in response as his neatly styled hair clung just a bit from sweat.
The room was silent for a moment, Bormann laughed his hateful little laugh like a meanspirited dwarf while Goering chortled. Did they find it funny? Or was it just that the sudden silence caused it involuntarily?
"His loyalty is affirmed repeatedly, and like a good national socialist, he repents for his sins of race regularly. Besides, we need a good face to show the world if we are to convince them to do business with us." Goering finally broke the silence, his menacing frame thinned to an evil countenance by his crash diet.
"We need capital, and investment if we are to fulfill our future four-year plans, and an embassy with which to speak to the wider world. Of course we should have expected the "United Nations" to reject us, but we have our own plan on that front anyway." He continued.
"On that note, Steiner is prepared to launch his attack on United Nations Wachguard and Allied forces at South Africa, if we are to save the Boer war effort, now is the time to act." Schorner found his star rising after managing to get Speidel blamed for the defeat and he was absolutely relishing in having the ear of a functioning Fuhrer again, eager to reform the Wehrmacht while keeping its nazi characteristics
Speer took a moment to pull out the map of Africa, with the latest one showing how precariously little territory the Boers still controlled, most having fled into Namibia and what was once Rhodesia in the hopes of avoiding Hackett's denazification squads, which he was told were often just rouding up and shooting people they confirmed to have met three criteria; owning weapons, membership in the national party, and having acted in rebellion against the Union government.
Of course, Leni Riefenstahl, the one and only woman in Speer's Cabinet outside of the Nazi Party's officials for women's affairs; was harping on that loud and strong as only the Propaganda Minister of the Reich and the overseer of its cultural programs could. He even proclaimed her promotion a "victory for the aryan woman who, through her own labours, has elevated herself as the aryan man did."
His thoughts were interrupted by Heydrich once again. "My SS can reclaim Johannesburg within weeks, and we will not let the shedding of Aryan blood go unpunished. Our kindred in Africa will have all they are owed and more."
"See to it that they are, Herr Heydrich. I will not have a state hostile to the Aryan people so close to the oil bounty of Angola, especially not when we have American, Russian, and Chinese communists meddling so close to the jewel of the Congo." He regarded the red splotch of territory where the Pan-African Liberation Front held sway with disdain. A Federation of African People's Republics? Not if he had anything to say about it.
I have no idea if this says something good for Japan or bad for FBU. Anyway great update. Also I wish to see everyone in the meeting room, maybe minus Helmut on I feel on any day, to meet their Red May counterparts in deepest of Hell they damn well belong in.
I have no idea if this says something good for Japan or bad for FBU. Anyway great update. Also I wish to see everyone in the meeting room, maybe minus Helmut on I feel on any day, to meet their Red May counterparts in deepest of Hell they damn well belong in.
Helmut is openly called the "court Jew" to his face by the cabinet and the inner circle and they hang over the fact that he is only alive because he is a useful face for diplomacy over his head constantly and that if he does not prove useful they will liquidate his entire family out to the second cousins.
Helmut is openly called the "court Jew" to his face by the cabinet and the inner circle and they hang over the fact that he is only alive because he is a useful face for diplomacy over his head constantly and that if he does not prove useful they will liquidate his entire family out to the second cousins.
Fair, I just use the belief of "if you're fine sitting with nine Nazis at a table, then theirs 10 Nazis at that table" as a baseline for my attitudes towards the right. Like I said, my feelings towards Helmut fluctuate on the day.
So Bormann, Goering, and Heydrich have (albiet grudgingly) accepted Speer as the new Fuhrer? Yeah, this confirms my belief that VOSCOM moved a little too fast on the Reichskommissariats. Even if the Civil War was retconned into a power struggle on the scale of the Great Purge, hitting the Nazis while they were in the midst of backstabbing each other over leadership probably would have not only been more successful due to the disruption that would entail for the homefront, but could have prevented Speer from being able to rally his opposition behind him by virtue of there already being too much blood spilled for it. Trying to go for mainland Asia at the same time - thereby dividing their resources - undoubtedly didn't help either.
The western spearheads reached as far as Lviv and Riga though? Surprised that VOSCOM didn't manage to take the Caucasus given that. Did they manage to carve off any part of RK Ukraine, Ostland, or Kaukasia?
I would use the "better the devil you know" quote here, but the devil he (Schmidt) does know is the worse possible fucking devil known to man, so *shrug* blame it on TNO deciding to have a 'reform' path for Nazi Germany that doesn't come with Berlin being occupied by allied forces.
So Bormann, Goering, and Heydrich have (albiet grudgingly) accepted Speer as the new Fuhrer? Yeah, this confirms my belief that VOSCOM moved a little too fast on the Reichskommissariats. Even if the Civil War was retconned into a power struggle on the scale of the Great Purge, hitting the Nazis while they were in the midst of backstabbing each other over leadership probably would have not only been more successful due to the disruption that would entail for the homefront, but could have prevented Speer from being able to rally his opposition behind him by virtue of there already being too much blood spilled for it. Trying to go for mainland Asia at the same time - thereby dividing their resources - undoubtedly didn't help either.
The western spearheads reached as far as Lviv and Riga though? Surprised that VOSCOM didn't manage to take the Caucasus given that. Did they manage to carve off any part of RK Ukraine, Ostland, or Kaukasia?
The greatest issue with focusing entirely on Germany is and always will be selling China on that. While there were advocates for a slower paced "movement building" approach in East China due to the very different nature of China's relation with Japan than occupied Eastern Europe's with Germany, a lot of tempers do run very hot when they see a republic governed by traitors shamelessly toadying to Japan while they have a means to launch an attack into the Nanjing puppet regime, especially with the Long Yun lead western insurrection building steam. But of course the issue is that East China is a client regime, not a settler colony governed as an apartheid state with slow motion genocide of the indigenous peoples. East China is also much bigger and more valuable to Japan than RK Moskowien is to Germany, while west China is much smaller in terms of manpower and industrial resources in proportion to east China than East Russia is to the RKs.
The CPS is also nowhere near as deliberately hobbled as the EINPAK where Germany's largest allies; Britain and France, are also kept on the shortest leash while necessity has forced Japan to invest heavily into a rapid response capable expeditionary military. Meanwhile, for fairly obvious reasons China doesn't actually keep all that many troops near the areas where they'd be deploying at by habit, nor does it invest all that strongly in the logistical capacity needed to make such a thing work on short notice because there's no need. The Soviet border is open and peaceful and huge mass mechanised combat formations are poorly suited for the border with the Indosphere. It was a campaign born in large part of a young socialist republic's desire to prove itself and to have its moment of glory, only to find that this is called the Japanese century for a good reason.
China has gone far, but it was a largely rural and majority nonindustrialised economy caught in the throes of a devastating foreign invasion as well as what amounted to a civil war with the Pro-Japanese warlords and Rightists twenty years ago. Many will of course, later come to the conclusion that government in Zhongjing really should have been more patient rather than try to expand the scope of the Zorya plan to also include China right away at the same time as a show of force.
As for the timing of the attack on Germany, this was also a bit of greed on the STAVKA's part as once they figured that only the Fuhrer is permitted to authorise offensive nuclear strikes with the German Nuclear arsenal and nuclear authority similarly rests in the Duce's hand in Italy, once Hitler was bedridden and the office was in a state of flux between the competing factions of the party state and while Italy was also in a state of political flux following the ousting of Ciano they believed that this was the best time to sweep all of Europe at once, perhaps even getting the OFN and AFS to join in a new crusade. In hindsight it was a hugely risky gamble that while glorious, hardened the reactionary order in Europe to rally around newer leadership and end the Rome-Berlin split lest they all hang together.
Of course this issue will be heavily politicised in the future, though the general attitude will be that freeing nearly the totality of Russia was at least, worth the cost of admission. Borders-wise, Sumy, Kharkhiv, Lukhansk, Poltava, and Chernihiv oblasts inn Ukraine are liberated, as are larger portions of Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Gomel in Belarus. In the baltics, large parts of Ida-Vilu, Polva, Voru and parts of Tartu in Estonia and large chunks of Latgale in Latvia are free in a partition that roughly follows natural lines of fortification and chokepoints.
Had they waited to the 70s, 80s, or 90s, they likely would have reached Poland as the circus of political crises that surround the later Reform or Control faction administrations and the devastating effects of the oil crisis and spartacist uprising across eastern Europe would have hollowed out the military and the effects of Nazi gerontocracy would have been devastating with a likely rapid series of successions as the dead Fuhrer is replaced by others in his inner circle who aren't really much younger themselves. The later the war starts, the more Nazi Germany will strain under having to maintain hostilities with the Italians, Communists, and Liberals all at once while demographic issues like "the incredible multiplying german youth bracket!" would grow more severe and its technological levels would fall further behind par due to overcompetition and a laundry list of perverse incentives and weird brainworms like regarding Computers as feminine.
I have no idea if this says something good for Japan or bad for FBU. Anyway great update. Also I wish to see everyone in the meeting room, maybe minus Helmut on I feel on any day, to meet their Red May counterparts in deepest of Hell they damn well belong in.
Both are multinational thalassocracies with globe-spanning influence built around sea and financial power that are roughly dividable into a continental half and an archipelagic half with a political system meant to narrow the overton window to within a certain range around Technocratic Developmentalism, Managerialist Dirigisme, and Corporatist Paternalism and have economies dominated by a select elite of megacorporations deeply linked to the state. They are basically twins separated at birth by the landmass of Eurasia and the gulf of spacetime.
Ah, fair enough then. Being honest, have not played much of TNO (one the choice of neon is a pain on my eyes and two I don't need more depressing stuff in my life) so I am basing my understanding of Japanese rulership of east Asia on their actions in Nanjing and the limited number of events I have read in r/tno.
Ah, fair enough then. Being honest, have not played much of TNO (one the choice of neon is a pain on my eyes and two I don't need more depressing stuff in my life) so I am basing my understanding of Japanese rulership of east Asia on their actions in Nanjing and the limited number of events I have read in r/tno.
I mean, there have been a lot of war crimes and horrible things, but it's well within the general norm of imperialism, just crunched into a shorter space of time. While cruel and often barbaric with an army that practices horrific anti-partisan practices and has an issue with discipline when it comes to professional conduct towards civilians, the Japanese are not ideologically set on killing people the way the Nazis or Fascists are. Killing people is a means to an end, whereas killing undesirables is an end in and of itself to the European reactionary bloc. It's a difference of degrees and forms of awfulness and also why Japan's "cooled" a lot compared to its European allies. The things they did to establish dominance in China are the stuff of nightmares, with more than a hundred urban areas sacked and tens of millions killed while many more died in industrialised horror camps in Manchuria to build the middle component of the world's greatest steel belt. But killing people is not the point, it's just an expediency taken.
In contrast Burgundy is explicitly designed with the purpose of centralising the liquidation of targets for the Holocaust into a vast sweatshop state to create vast quantities of goods at rock bottom prices to raise money for the Fascist bloc that literally sells the ashes of the people it cremates once they invariably die from overwork and malnutrition as a form of "pig based" fertiliser you try to not ask questions about the source of. While Manchukuo came to similar degrees of ghoulishness in terms of disposal of the sheer amount of corpses piling up in the slave labour facilities, Manchuria has gradually "normalised" to some degree in order to settle into the modern economic system, there's still plenty of coerced labour, but the high tide of Kishinomics has largely passed.
Though the material difference is that Japan is an ascendant power with its fingers on the pulse of global markets and is the centre of gravity to which capital accumulates to, while Germany is an autarkic pariah state that wants to cleanse enormous numbers of people off of huge amounts of land to expand the boundaries of the Germanic nation state, while Japan is more of a conventional if cruel hegemonic empire,
It's understandable that Voscom would invade when they did. They can't count on waiting decades for Germany to self-implode, not once they've arrived on the scene. It's reasonable that people in Voscom would have expected a similar outcome to occur if they hadn't invaded Eastern Europe. There's no reason to wait when the Nazis are being Nazis. Voscom can't know that if they wait 20 to 30 years they can push to Berlin. That's millions more dead and enslaved. It's entirely possible that had they focused everything on Russia the Pakt lines would have collapsed and the road to Berlin could have opened up.
There's also the fact that the Pakt was going to remain a major threat in the timeline no matter what, so a full victory was never in the cards. Nonetheless it's interesting to see how it's played out. That's a lot of people dead in under a year without an official declaration of war too. I'm amazed Germany held up in the face of the attack, honestly.
I mean, I'm not talking about waiting a decade, I'm talking about waiting a few months. Just long enough for Hitler to die and the actual power struggles to start killing each other and their supporters which - given how politicized the German officer corps has become - would invariably include a chunk of the army and SS leadership. Still, it's understandable why they did move as quickly as they did.
Borders-wise, Sumy, Kharkhiv, Lukhansk, Poltava, and Chernihiv oblasts inn Ukraine are liberated, as are larger portions of Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Gomel in Belarus. In the baltics, large parts of Ida-Vilu, Polva, Voru and parts of Tartu in Estonia and large chunks of Latgale in Latvia are free in a partition that roughly follows natural lines of fortification and chokepoints.
"On that note, Steiner is prepared to launch his attack on United Nations Wachguard and Allied forces at South Africa, if we are to save the Boer war effort, now is the time to act."
Speer took a moment to pull out the map of Africa, with the latest one showing how precariously little territory the Boers still controlled, most having fled into Namibia and what was once Rhodesia in the hopes of avoiding Hackett's denazification squads, which he was told were often just rouding up and shooting people they confirmed to have met three criteria; owning weapons, membership in the national party, and having acted in rebellion against the Union government.
While German sympathetic accounts stress the viciousness of reprisals against German settlers and officials by oppressed civilians, it is the academic opinion of this account that such acts of revenge after decades of slavery deserve sympathy and pity, not condemnation by those who have never had to experience the effects of Generalplan Ost. And even at their most vicious and cruel, more mercy was shown to the German civilians by these partisans whose excesses, while not always restrained, were never considered permissible or laudable by the STAVKA of the Compact's intervention force. Discipline against reports of rape, looting, or civilian reprisal was quick and harsh, and an image of a professional red soldier was encouraged.
It's interesting to see how a Capitalist Bloc-aligned paper is so sympathetic to the Reds, especially when OTL's Western media had/has no issue digging up German accounts (up to an including blatant propaganda about Soviet conduct in the final days of the war) to smear the commies. Either it's because relations are fairly amicable between OFAN and REVCON in 2022 and/or the very fresh memory of Nazism's destruction being even more pronounced here than in the late 40s through 50s.
"See to it that they are, Herr Heydrich. I will not have a state hostile to the Aryan people so close to the oil bounty of Angola, especially not when we have American, Russian, and Chinese communists meddling so close to the jewel of the Congo." He regarded the red splotch of territory where the Pan-African Liberation Front held sway with disdain. A Federation of African People's Republics? Not if he had anything to say about it.
I'm assuming VOSCOM is going to get dragged into the SA War indirectly by Zentralafrika attacking the FAPR? Or is that just a "nudge wink" for something down the line? On one hand, the Pan-Africans are still licking their wounds and trying to build up the dilapitated post-colonial territories they gained, so now is the time when they are a soft-enough target. On the other, I doubt Speer would have the audacity to try to commit a force to the north especially as the OFN and AFS are raining down the heavy ordnance so close to the southern RKs.
Then again, Speer is a Nazi however much he likes to think himself the pragmatist, and probably thinks the Bolshevik structure (especially one primarily populated and governed with "subhumans") will easily crumble in the face of any real, concentrated assault, without the rest of REVCON looking for just a second.
