32年 6月 10日
Summer over Europe was not peaceful. The Polish pocket was surrounded and the enveloping Chinese forces moved in to complete the liberation of Poland. As always, the priority targets for encirclement were the German panzer divisions. Padma Rana was gaining a reputation as an excellent Field commander, and would become one of the few Non Chinese officers to receive a 雲麾勳章 (Order of the Cloud and Banner) medal for his contribution to the war effort.
Inside the pocket, the trapped German divisions were hopelessly outnumbered and would be forced to retreat across the river.
The best of the Wehrmacht would die in Poland. Chinese troops had surrounded Danzig. The five divisions within the city had been forbidden from retreating. Their orders were to hold the city at all costs or die trying. They would do the latter. Further south, some 14 German divisions were under attack from all sides. The goal was to herd them into Lublin where a mass surrender could be affected. What was surprising, was the general unwillingness of the German High Command to surrender. Even the lower level generals had a tendency to underestimate their Chinese opposition. Intellectually, they knew that they were in trouble, but they didn't quite believe it and it usually took an object lesson for that to change.
32年 6月 11日
The small island of Bornholm was a target for several reasons. The Chinese were eager to liberate Denmark and thus open up the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea route for supplying the massive armies now in theater. Bornholm, if left alone, could potentially close off the Baltic to Allied shipping. Zhang Fakui sent several Pabing divisions supported by the divisional artillery of 9 other divisions to attack the island. Thankfully, the German garrison was not in the mood to hole up and the garrison would surrender once the first Chinese troops reached the beaches.
Kustrin guarded the Oder river and was thus the last natural barrier before Berlin. Pang Bingxun and the First Bingtuan were the ones tasked with capturing the capital of the Reich. This was the oldest and most decorated unit in the Republic of China Army. It had been formed out of the original German trained divisions of the National Revolutionary army. The honor and irony of being the first into Berlin was not lost on any of the officers under Pang Bingxun's command. At 64, Pang Bingxun was one of the oldest generals serving in the Army but he had proven to be one of its best. The Germans in Kustrin were well organized and capable but they lacked the numbers to hold back the advancing Chinese.
32年 6月 12日
The Germans were not about to let the Poland pocket fall without a fight. The southern edge of the encircling forces was weak, and the Germans would mass their tanks in an attempt to make a breakthrough at Czestochowa. Fu Zuoyi and his cavalry divisions were not in any position to fight nor did they have the equipment to take on 800 modern German tanks. As the first patrols made contact, only to be blown apart by massed German fire, the Chinese finally understood why the Germans inside the pocket had refused to surrender. A counterattack was ordered against the the German rear as the armored spearhead was too strong to take on directly.
32年 6月 13日
Padma Rana and the Nepalis smashed into the remaining German soldiers in Lublin. The risk of German breakthrough in the south had moved up the timetable for liquidating the pocket.
32年 6月 14日
Hoff Lu had finished setting up the College of Nuclear Physics at Fudan University in Shanghai, （原子核物理学家). The next step was building a real research laboratory. This was easy as China had been able to copy the physics department at Columbia University. Igor Kurchatov and what remained of the Soviet Union's modest nuclear physics academia had been recovered and offered teaching jobs at the new department.
Building a state of the art research lab was more difficult as it was an expensive and time consuming process. For the scientists there, it was a dream come true. They were being offered a blank check from the ROC to design and build any equipment they wanted and run any experiments they desired. As part of the effort, Fudan University was aggressively recruiting from American and British Universities. Fudan's location in Shanghai aided this effort tremendously as the former concession areas allowed English speaking students a comfortable environment while still giving them access to the "exoticism" of China.
In the occupied territories, unrest was a fact of life. Chinese garrison forces were small, spread out, and mostly concerned with guarding the rail lines between the China and Europe. After smashing the apparatus of state security, the vast Chinese armies had moved on, leaving a power vacuum that threatened to be filled by rebellious elements. So far partisan activity had been limited to a few strikes on railroads and power lines.
There hadn't been any outright rebellions so far. The Chinese government had played host to numerous white Russian exiles since the close of the Russian Civil war in 1923 and Harbin and Shanghai played host to huge Russian communities. When the war with the Soviets had started, the Republic of China Army foresaw the need for Russian translators and administrators and thus had offered massive inducements to get the White Russian exile community to enlist. These included money, a right of return provided appropriate documents, and access to secondary schooling. The law of unintended consequences was in full effect. For example, the Army medical corps had begun recruiting Russian emigre women as nurses and the success of the program had led the army to make a special dispensation for female translators. This had a startling effect in Shanghai. In 1935, a league of Nations inquiry had determined that 22% of Russian women in Shanghai between 16 and 45 engaged in some form of prostitution. The Social Affairs Bureau had tried with very limited success to somehow curtail the explosive vice that gave Shanghai its exotic reputation. Student protests and official edicts had had almost no effect. Within one month of the new policy (November 1941), word had spread through the dance halls and massage parlors that Russian speaking women had a train ticket promising money, regular food, and a roof over their head if they could get to a recruiting office. In two years, over 1000 White Russian girls had escaped prostitution by joining the military.
In general, the Chinese government had been taking full advantage of the near unanimous support offered by 300,000 + Russian exile community in China. For 20 years, the Russians in China had been second class citizens. They had no passports and had been forced to carve a niche for themselves within Chinese society. Without extraterritoriality, they were under Chinese jurisdiction and were often targets of anti foreign sentiment in lieu of better protected targets. The foreign community generally viewed them with pity and disdain. The existence of a white underclass in the prosperous trading ports of China served as an unwelcome reminder that the supremacy of Europeans in Asia might not be the natural order that the founders of empire enshrined. The liberation of Russia offered an opportunity for social advancement that no Russian could ignore. Bryan Shaw wrote about the plight of the Russian community in Shanghai in his novel Sin City,
"The dream of every single White Russian woman in China was to acquire a passport. She was stateless, had no country, could go nowhere. She was not a Soviet citizen but a refugee from Communist rule. The best prospect, of course, was an American passport. Thus single American males became the chief prey. Young, middle-aged, senile, handsome, ugly as sin, long, short, fat, thin ... no matter. The goal was a passport. The British, the French, the Germans - anybody with a legal travel document were secondary prey.
Unlike their womenfolk the White Russian males were doomed to suffer the stigma Of statelessness unless, by some miracle, they could find their various ways to such countries as the United States, Australia, New Zealand or some British colony, there to reside long enough to apply for citizenship.
The lot of the Russian male in Shanghai was pitiful. The single other man had little hope of marrying a girl of his own race - or any. He had nothing to offer. Feminine eyes had in focus only those with a national status, with well-paid jobs, with homelands well up in the international league. What Prospect, for instance, could be offered by a former officer in the Czarist army who was working as a caretaker in one of the Sassoon office blocks? Or a former Russian admiral eking out a precarious existence as a cemetery keeper?."
Their prospects improved dramatically as the need for loyal Russians with military training were boundless. They found themselves put in charge of cities, town, oblasts, and factories all across Russia.
One of the things that they were in charge of was currency policy. The Soviet Union had not had very much currency in circulation as most of it was government controlled. Because of this, it had been fairly easy to start a program buying up the Gold Soviet Rubles and replacing them with the so called "Russian yuan" (it was also known locally in Russia as the "Chinese Ruble"). Smaller denominations were replaced with paper while larger ones were replaced with their equivalent value in silver.
Another thing that had kept dissent down in Russia was that almost half of the population had been under German occupation before the Chinese got there. The people that remained were fairly unanimous when it came to greeting the Chinese as liberators.
Chinese spies were confident that Germany had lost another 17 infantry and 5 panzer divisions in the past two weeks of fighting. The Luftwaffe was also severely understrength and had not been seen in force for months.
The primary goal of the offensive in the Balkans was to remove the all Axis forces from the Black Sea. As long as the Black Sea was combatant waters, Turkey would not allow either side entrance through Istanbul. Troops from Bucharest were ordered to move across the border against weak resistance into Bulgaria.
32年 6月 15日
Chinese forces were ordered into Straslund to cut off Berlin from the rest of Germany. The goal was to surround the city before the Germans could move in significant reinforcements.
32年 6月 16日
After successfully clearing Finland of Axis forces, Long Yun had been reassigned to Romania in hopes that he could replicate his success. The attack into the Carpathians was brutal but the Germans were simply running out of warm bodies to throw at the Chinese. They would be forced to retreat.
The German forces who had tried to rescue the Polish Pocket came under attack in Cracow from overwhelming Chinese forces. Luo Zhuoying and the Second Bingtuan were more than capable of seeing the Germans on their way.
32年 6月 17日
Mechanized repair and transport was by far the most difficult task facing the Chinese army. Most soldiers had never seen any modern machinery before entering the military and had to be trained from scratch.
As war wound down, Sun Li-Jen was put in charge of codifying what would become China's post war doctrine, Xingsugong （行速攻） It roughly translated as movement - speed - offensive in English. (The three characters "行" meaning "move," "速" meaning "quick", and 攻 meaning "attack.") The basic idea was the same one that the Chinese had been following since the war began. Chinese armies focused on moving faster, lighter, and with more than anyone else. The idea was not based on mass, rather it was based on motion. Historical and contemporary Chinese military thought viewed land as largely unimportant when it came to objectives and strategic goals. The goal was the destruction of the enemy will and capability to fight and terrain and territory were secondary to that goal. The collision of military mass was to be avoided.
The advancing forces in Kustrin were hit from the South by German panzer divisions. The German panzers were the only combat ready forces in northern Europe and they weren't about to let Berlin go without a fight.
32年 6月 18日
The problem was that the panzers had far too much ground to defend. A general front wide offensive would force them back as the tanks were simply overwhelmed.
The Romanian offensive continued with an assault into Arad. It was hoped that Hungary could be separated from the front in Romania.
Slovakia was an aberration of country forced born out of Nazi greed. Eliminating Nazi puppet regimes was a priority for the Chinese as they hoped it might induce their fellows to surrender without fighting.
Victory in Kosice would be welcome news as the offensiive in Arad stalled due to fresh Axis reinforcements.
32年 6月 20日
Chinese troops had arrived in Kustrin and had started to surround Berlin from both the North and South in preparation for the final assault. The position north was holding against a weak German counterattack and it was hoped that moving troops south would reduce casualties when it came time for the final push on the city.
Chinese troops stormed into the teeth of the German defenses in Debrecen. The fall of Arad offered an opportunity to encircle a few more German divisions in Hungary.
32年 6月 21日
Chinese mobile forces once again arrived in an Axis capital.
They would accept the surrender of the Slovak Republic's leaders, most of whom had already been captured by the revolutionaries in anticipation of liberation.
Slovakia had been the shield protecting the Hungary's northern border. With Slovakia gone, there were no Axis forces left to contest the Chinese advance into Budapest.
32年 6月 22日
Only the western approaches to Berlin remained in Axis hands and Yan Xishan was in charge of changing that. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops had made it across the Oder and they moved north to cut off the final retreat for any Germans left in Berlin.
32年 6月 23日
The six German divisions in Berlin were in for a fight as almost a million Chinese troops attacked the city from all sides.
This could be the end! Find out next time on AARight to Be Hostile!
Chinese Quiz: No one has answered the question about the armored car yet. I'm kind of disappointed. (especially maj von mauser who is a licensed screenshot ninja.)
