Explorations in Strategy - Italy at War

Baltasar: No formations lost, fortunately. It was certainly hairy at times. As for future plans, we'll see.

Ahriman: I think the Italians have run out of furniture by now. As for the soldiers, hopefully a rest.

Maj. von Mauser: We'll see!

Stuyvesant: The easternmost armies did withdraw to a certain extent, but are still playing around out east.

WhisperingDeath: Glad you're enjoying it!

rasmus40: Thanks!

Enewald: Possibly...

Lamahorse: There isn't really much of a wider war to look at.

walnutr113: I didn't really notice the winter at all. Maybe it was unusually warm. As for a more limited offensive, it would have been possible but Mussolini was bit was the decisiveness bug.

Update coming up!

The Year of Ruin
Part 9: Teutonic Action, April 17 – May 29, 1945

There are two ways by which one might measure the worth of one’s allies. One gauge is how well they act in concert with one’s own operations and purposes. By this standard, the Germans have been the worst allies to have graced the international stage in decades. They had proved themselves incapable of acting alongside the Italians in any truly meaningful way, being useful only for negative purposes—that is, preventing the enemy from achieving his own goals—but not for positive aims, or actually achieving anything on their own. They distributed forces poorly, dedicating dozens of formations to the Illyrian front when they could have been constructively employed in Finland, and then sent divisions to Finland by the score when they could have been usefully deployed on the main front against the Soviets. The Germans proved themselves as good for little more than backup, and even then they were inconsistent in their abilities, as the forced withdrawal of Italian forces to Dacia indicated. The second way by which one may judge one’s allies is by how they act in isolation. This is perhaps as somewhat ironic means of measurement, given that the whole concept of an ally is based upon acting in concert. And yet the Germans have indeed achieved things on their own, albeit only after long and grueling fights. They managed to conquer France on their own, as well as Scandinavia.

It is by this second measure that their action after the Italian withdrawal should be judged; once again they were acting in effective isolation from any other allied effect, notwithstanding negligible allies such as Slovakia or Luxembourg. And so it seems that they did indeed act as the Italians were withdrawing from the heart of the Soviet Union. To counter the Italian menace, the Soviets had had to strip the German front of considerable forces, to the extent that by the latter half of April single divisions were holding entire provinces in the recently acquisitioned Soviet Baltic territories. The Germans thus burst forth across the Daugava River, the greatest of the Baltic rivers. Before them they scattered the meager remnants of weak and allied divisions, including British and Mongolian formations. The Germans struck into Estonia and toward Pskov. They were acting in nearly reasonably strategic behavior, taking advantage of the enemy’s weakness, although this accomplishment came at the tail end of a long string of mistakes and lost opportunities.


The Germans! Being useful!

By the latter half of May, the Germans had advanced to the western bank of the Narva River, having conquered most of Estonia. Simultaneously, they had broken out of the Finnish deadlock and were striking southward with some haste, having reached the chain of great lakes between the Baltic and White Seas by eschewing tangling with the Finns in favor of striking down the strip of Soviet territory between Finland and the White Sea. Even in Finland, however, they attacked and achieved some success, pushing the Finns southward to a minor extent. The Soviets were being pressed hard by the Germans in two disparate theaters, even as they attempted to reclaim the great expanses of the Ukraine that had been lost to the Italians. Space was now working against the Soviets to a certain extent, for they were trying to defend all yet their forces were spread thin across a vast area. Nevertheless, the Soviets were beginning to achieve some successes of their own. Reinforcements to the Baltic were pressuring the Germans heavily, squeezing them out of much of Latvia that they had previously occupied and reducing them to just a handful of bridges over the Daugava, all of them in the largest Baltic city, Riga.


The Germans were advancing on two fronts, but the Soviets were far from beaten.

In the ten days that followed, the German situation quickly deteriorated even further after the promising signs of late April. Riga fell, and with it much of the rest of Latvia and parts of southern Estonia. The German vanguard in the Baltic States had been cut off and isolated in northern Estonia. The Soviets, meanwhile, had swept westward and had nearly reached the southern shores of the Baltic Sea. They had even crossed the line, and stepped upon real German territory in East Prussia. The German position in Poland was also steadily collapsing as their armies were forced back. The Soviets were closing on Warsaw and Krakow, not to mention the German city of Konigsberg. The Germans had managed to stabilize a line in Ukraine, but in such circumstances it would have been far better for their armies that far east to withdraw via the Balkans to reinforce German forces in Poland, which were beginning to thin out at a frightening rate. The Germans had apparently rarely reinforced formations, preferring instead to form new divisions. Thus, hit by the brunt of a major Soviet offensive, shells of units were simply evaporating in the carnage.


The brief German gust of success had dried out.

Mussolini had watched these developments first with surprise and surprised confidence but soon realized that while the former feeling was entirely justified the latter entirely was not. He quickly began to view the developments north of the Balkans with some alarm. If the Soviets pushed hard enough, the entire German state could disintegrate, and then where would that leave Italy?! Italy would suddenly have a number of rather vulnerable fronts with the Soviets and not have the forces to hold them all: the Alps on the border with Austria, the Alps on the border with France, and the Pyrenees as well. This was all assuming that the Soviets were the sole hostile actor, but indeed the collapse of Germany and its imperial apparatus could well encourage the British to cross the Channel and try to salvage some portion of the continent for themselves. It was clearly a vey dangerous situation, and left Mussolini with no choice. Army Group East would return to the fray.


The Italians, to the rescue once more.

Thus the Italians would once more brave the breach. The hastily thrown together concept of operations returned to more the traditional mores of military strategy, particularly of targeting the enemy army. The Italians would take advantage of the German foolishness in trying to hold Ukraine to use it as a stepping stone in their new task: the destruction of the Red Army.

Maj. von Mauser: Possibly.

Axe27: The choice between two save games wasn't that, and it was made a long time ago.

Lamahorse: Hehe, we'll see.

GrenadierSchube: God no way do I want to be controlling the eastern front. I categorically do not want to control more than I already have (unit-wise). And yes the crash was a real crash.

WhisperingDeath: Hehe we'll see.

Baltasar: I'm pretty sure the Germans don't have manpower, which is one of their problems.

Enewald: Paths don't just up and disappear, you know.

I'll try for an update tonight! But I'm also a bit busy writing other things and replaying BG2 so we'll see how that goes.