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unmerged(51844)

Second Lieutenant
Dec 19, 2005
113
0
Lithuania Takes On the World



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Game settings:
Lithuania's initial IC is so low (Barely enough to build a factory) that rising the difficulty above Normal/Normal will simply make the AAR uninteresting. This Grand Campaign will start in 1936.

Game Objective:
The Objective of this Grand Campaign is to conquer as much land as possible.


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The Soon to be Great Lithuania!
 
Finally, a Baltic AAR! :D
 
Sadly, most of these small nations AAR end when their authors realize that it is basically impossible to have any control over what happens in the world with 5 IC and 2 divisions. Unless you manage to have GErmany conquer the USSR by making the initial push from your territory...but thankfully that tactic no longer works in 1.3 :D
 
Are you gonna cheat like I usually do? :D

I'm actually gonna play unmodded after I finish my California AAR.
 
Earth's Savior said:
Are you gonna cheat like I usually do? :D

I'm actually gonna play unmodded after I finish my California AAR.

If I recall, in no offense, you said you were not going to write another Hearts of Iron 2 AAR.

I wish you luck on your journey, the Baltics are a fun place...

...to conquer.
 
Just don't let Estonia and Latvia cave into the Soviets' demands of everything, if Molotov-Ribbentrop happens. Yech.
 
Narwa said:
The Objective of this Grand Campaign is to conquer as much land as possible.

Good luck with that. Total number of provinces conquered: one or two, before the Soviets realized they were at war with you....


ER, did I say that? I mean, I wish you well! :D
 
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January-March 1936: The Longest Journey Begins with One Step

The first step in the long way to total world domination was a small slider move on January 1st. Lithuania was slowly breaking her neutrality shell by adopting a more solid Interventionist policy.

As part of this policy Lithuania greatly improved her relantioship with Nazi Germany, given the similarity of the ruling ideology in both countries.

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Lithuania was very poor in terms of industry and technology. It was lagging centuries behind her future servants like England and it would be hard to bring the country out of the Dark Ages. Since it would follow a violent foreign policy, the goverment decided to focus whatever resources they had on the Army, by imposing draft, to bring it back to normal numbers, and by upgrading the equipment and tactics used by it, along with financing research projects of new weapons for it.

It would take many months to fill all the gaps.

For now, the Army consisted of 3 Infantry divisions. The Navy, apart from the merchat one, was a flotilla of transport ships, and the Air Force was a severly under strenght interceptor squadron.


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The first evidence of Lithuanian power occured in March 1st, when Lithuania massed it's troops in the border with Poland and threatened to attack. Altough those threats were really empty, the Polish goverment feared German intervention in favor of Lithuania and thus agreed to cede a small portion of it's northern provinces to the rising superpower, demanding only a non-agression pact in return.

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This was seen as a glorious victory by the Lithuanian people, whose faith on their goverment grew, but it was more important than that- the region had a small factory complex, that the country needed sorely.

Lithuania was growing fast- soon it would be too big for it's own borders.

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"Jesus, what a bullsh... crap :D " - my first reaction on those lines about smillarity of ideology and Poland giving up Wilno... :D "Massed it's troops" hehe... It was Lithuania which had to give in to polish demands of starting normal diplomatic relations, and in real life at the begining of '36 Germany were still to weak to risk a conflict with Poland. But it's a game, i know :)

Keep up the good work, I'll be following this one.
 
So what do you plan to do when Germany claims Memel? I think refusal means war...acceptance means you lose your only port. My solution was to align with Germany and help in Operation Barbarossa. It was iffy at first as to whether I would survive, but I eventually conquered most of the Baltic Sea before the more rapid German conquests simply encircled me.
 
Thanks :)

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March-May 1936: The Baltic in Fire

The month following the recovery of Wilno and Grodno was spent upgrading the obselete arsenal of the Army to the best possible models. The first unit to seee upgrade was the artillery attachment of the II Division, whose early century guns were replaced with late Great War models. Further upgrade would need further research which was uncomplete for now.

The country's industrial capacity was too small to attempt anything bigger than upgrading. The whole country together could not afford to equip and train and entirely new infantry division. There was only one way to solve this: Conquest- Lithuania turned to it's neighboors looking for the weakest one.

Poland and Germany are out of the question.

So is the U.S.S.R, for now.

Finland's military is a little bit too big.

Sweden is too big for the three Lithuanian divisions.

Latvia and Estonia, however, have small and outdated armies- they will fall first.

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On march 28th, Lithuanian troops started to move across the border between the two countries. A declaration of war was issued some minutes later. It didn't take long for Estonia to declare war back on Lithuania to protect it's neighboor.

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The Lithuanian Army, led by Lt. Gen Rastikis, occupied Jelgava in a matter of days and by April 3 he could see the Latvian capital, Riga, with his own eyes.

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He decided to assault the city that same day, before more Latvian troops could arrive to defend it.

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The defense of the capital was in the hands of a lone infantry division, that fought fiercely during an entire day to hold the river. The Lithuanians suffered many casualities crossing it, but still overwhelmed the defenders and effectively took the capital the morning of the 6th before it could be reinforced, and held it against a counter-attack.

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With the capital in enemy hands the Latvian goverment tried to end the conflict with diplomacy. The Lithuanian garrison in Riga threatened to burn down the whole city unless the goverment accepted the Lithuanian demands of full annexation, thing that accepted quickly. Every Latvian soldier marched towards the nearest Lithuanian counterpart and surrendered his weapons during the following days. Only the Estonians kept fighting, severly slowling down the Lithuanian advance.

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The Germans, that to that point had stayed neutral, decided to intervene in favor of Lithuania, entering formally a military alliance with her. Altough it was already too late to worry about the actual fighting, the Germans sent a fast cavalry unit from Eastern Prussia, that working closely with the Lithuanian troops, achieved a breaktrough in less than an hour and took the capital on the 13th. The same diplomatic actions were taken and Estonia was forced to become part of the Greater Lithuania that same day.

This attracted nothing more than formal complaints from countries like England and France, but the Soviet Union took a step further and canceled the non-agression pact with Lithuania. Stalin was furious as the Baltic was supposed to be inside it's sphere of influence but did not dare to do anything else, mostly because of Germany's alliance with the Baltic Superpower.

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This alliance brought much good- The Lithuanians soon recieved many blueprints, and favorable trade agreements. The modernization of the Army was much easier and more invasions could take place ahead of schedule.

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