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Kennedy looking into German espionage, I wonder what he'll be able to find? This move can make him an even bigger star in the eyes of the American public.
 
VM - Well, there's plenty to find - I've been stealing SPG designs off them for ten, fifteen years, and half the German doctrinal playbook is from Marshall and Company in the US Army. Kind of like some of the wingnut conspiracists out there who insist that McCarthy was right, but the Army couldn't afford to back him up...

Shadow - Thanks, glad to have you aboard. I'm (hopefully) approaching the endgame, but by "approaching" I mean I'm now playing in the 1960s.
 
That depends - I checked, and the Hitler death events aren't slated to fire until 1965. At current game speeds, I expect to finish my doctorate first. :p
 
I got linked in here from the AAR showcase . . . hadn't really been following any way you might call "diligent" until now. But this looks interesting enough and to spare - gonna have to flip back to the start and read the whole thing!:)

By the way, you won the showcase:D
 
Thanks to all currently reading - I've actually got more written for the next update than played out, but that's due to stuff like Raeder visiting Germaniawerft in March when I actually laid down the keels in January, things like that.
 
Saw this in the showcase and just read the whole AAR. Interesting and enjoyable.

However, what I really want to say is this is most excellent writing. It's been incredibly easy to read what at first sight looks like screen after screen of text - to my mind that's a sign of successful quality writing.
 
Indeed. Probably the best HoI2 AAR ever made. With excellent attention to historical detail and a good deal of alt-history realism (I especially enjoy how realistically you switched Hitler from anti-Semitism to Slavophobia. The fact that you were able to change the man all associate with anti-Semitism and turn him neutral towards the Jews is nothing but a work of genius. Nothing against the Slavs, though; I do feel bad for how their entire culture is slowly being eradicated.) this AAR brings entertainment as well as enlightenment. Kudos, good sir, and thanks for the great read thus far.
 
Small OOC update - it's December 12, 1960 in-game. Like I said, I figure I'll wrap up my doctorate about the same time I reach the death of Hitler...

And thanks all around, I haven't abandoned this. I'm just slogging... next time the game crashes, which to be fair hasn't been that often, I'll probably delete all the sprites and just go with counters to simplify graphics processing. Plus editing in a few BRD and DDR ministers, leaders, and teams to make up for the fact that Germany's dead-end in 1945. The idea that no new division commanders appear in twenty years seems a little ludicrous, and I really want Heinz Trettner leading an air cav division. ;)
 
December of 1960... I wonder who you have a President? :p
 
In December of 1960? Dwight David Eisenhower. The inauguration isn't for a few more weeks. :p
 
Well, there was an election. After that, there's two months of limbo, then there's an inauguration. Not tellin' 'til the appropriate moment.
 
Part VII: A New Era

1. New Leaders, New Foes

The ailing, aged Fuehrer made very little reaction to the American senator Kennedy, despite his onetime acquaintanceship with the senator's father. Matters within the Reich occupied his attention as the 1960s began. A minor revolution within the Luftwaffe spent the last political capital of its leaders - Kesselring and Sperrle retired for good in January of 1960. Kesselring would die in six months, Sperrle in nine, but they achieved their goal as a new generation of leadership took control of the Luftwaffe. Reichsmarschall Ritter von Greim submitted his resignation at the same time as the other marshals, at the Fuehrer's request. The Fuehrer claimed that such gross insubordination as the marshals had displayed was clear evidence of poor leadership, and the humiliated Reichsmarschall retired to Munich, where he became a director of the Messerschmitt firm. His replacement as Reichsmarschall der Luftwaffe and Reichsluftfahrtminister was Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Fuehrer's "knight" and the hero of South America. Rudel was a proponent of the close air support wing of the Luftwaffe, but maintained a healthy attitude toward the fighter force (Ritter von Greim's favorites) and the new Chief of Strategic Bombers, Marshal Wolfram von Richtofen. Von Richtofen, a cousin of the Great War aviation legend, had served both Kesselring and Sperrle as chief of staff at one time or another throughout the 1930s and 1940s, then survived a serious bout with brain cancer in the 1940s to rise to prominence as a successful bomber commander in his own right. The Luftwaffe had retained him through the cancer at first purely for his name, which was considered magical, but in the 1950s, he had emerged as Rudel's strategic-bombardment counterpart. What he lacked, compared to Rudel, was an opportunity to show his bombers' abilities.

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Figure 138: The new leadership of the Luftwaffe after the "Marshals' Revolt," 1960. From left to right, Reichsmarschall Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram von Richtofen, Generaloberst Adolf Galland

While the Luftwaffe underwent its own convulsions, the Reichsmarine was engaged in negotiations with the Royal Navy, finally acquiring perhaps the ultimate in advantages over the United States Navy - permission to construct and man submarine pens in Jamaica and Belize. These submarine bases, so close to the United States, would be invaluable in the event of a war, and Admiral Doenitz was careful in his selection of captains and boats for the American Station, as it rapidly became known. Captains who failed to measure up to Doenitz's exacting standards found themselves commanding tenders and transports; as the cruiser fleet was updated, there were a surprising number of unfit commanders promoted in the first flush of 1948.

Doenitz took time from this schedule to celebrate the man who had reinvented the Reichsmarine - the ailing Reichsadmiral Erich Raeder, whom Doenitz had sworn would be the only living Reichsadmiral. On a sunny May 12, 1960, Raeder left his Kiel home in mid-March, escorted by an honor guard of Ramcke's marines, to visit the Germaniawerft yards, where Doenitz met him and presented perhaps the ultimate gift for the old battleship admiral. Raeder presided over laying down the keel of the Reichsmarine's newest battleship - already named the Erich Raeder. It was the last time the Reichsadmiral would see his beloved Reichsmarine. He died peacefully on November 6, 1960 at his Kiel home, two days before the election in the United States, and laid in state in the Reichskanzlerei before his interment at the base of the station ensign at Kiel.

The Raeder was the first ship of a planned class tentatively named after the Grand Admirals, which conspicuously left out Doenitz himself - as he said, it was unlikely the battleship gang would ever consent to naming a big-gun ship after him. The class was meant to replace the Bismarck; it was marginally slower, but much better armed, and from a crew perspective infinitely preferable, being a full hundred meters longer and displacing two and a half times as much as the Bismarck class. Compared to the Bismarck, the Raeder was practically a KdF cruiser for the average sailor. In comparison, the ship weighed almost twice as much as the Japanese Yamato, the previous nonpareil of warship design and crew comfort.

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Figure 139: DRMS Erich Raeder, the first of the "Grossadmiral" class

The keel-laying would be the Reichsadmiral's last interaction with the navy which he had been instrumental in creating. He died six months later, on November 6, 1960, at his home. He was eighty-four years old and had served in the Reichsmarine, and before it the Kaiserliche Marine, for sixty-six years.

The death of Reichsadmiral Raeder and the promotion of Reichsmarschall Rudel marked a change in German policy, with the final ascent of the generation which had fought in the front lines during the War Years. It was also symbolic of the Fuehrer's own status. Many of these men were only partially mature when the Fuehrer had begun his ascent; Rudel himself was only sixteen on January 30, 1933. The man commonly expected to succeed the Fuehrer, SS-Hauptgruppenfuehrer Heydrich, was only fifty-five at the beginning of 1960, and could be expected to live another twenty-five years, especially given his active, vigorous lifestyle. In contrast, the Fuehrer was barely capable of public appearances by this point. His condition had worsened to the point that he required assistance to walk - a fact which was carefully concealed from Germany as a whole, presenting only the appearance of an aged, grandfatherly figure whose wisdom had guided Germany for nearly thirty years now.

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Figure 140: The Fuehrer - Adolf Hitler at seventy, 1960

The Fuehrer's management style had changed considerably during his leadership of Germany. Where early in the Reich's history he had directly controlled much of the decision-making in his ministries, by 1960 he had delegated nearly all of his true authority - though he retained tremendous symbolic power, he rarely exerted it directly. The exceptions were cases like the Marshals' Revolt of 1960 and the space program, which by now had become an all-consuming obsession of his. He received a monthly briefing from General Dornberger, head of the program, and in March of 1960 finally accepted General Becker's retirement in order to replace the academically inclined general with the younger, more vital Dornberger. Becker had little time to enjoy his return to teaching; he was by now eighty years old, and constant association with the Fuehrer had taxed him to the utmost. Still, he was able to return to Friedrich-Wilhelm University to teach for the 1960-1961 term, graduating his last students.

Becker was one of many general officers who retired at the beginning of the 1960s; it was a transition period very similar to the 1930s in the way the Reichswehr thought. Lessons from the Andean War and from exercises with the new generation of armor and aircraft came to maturity during this period; American observers called the emerging doctrine the "super blitz," though as with Guderian's philosophy of the 1930s, there was no truly unified philosophy in the Reichswehr. The "super blitz" philosophy relied on the same concepts as the earlier warfighting techniques, with some important additions based on refinements of the Reich's supply capacity. Fully mobile supply columns eased the problem of armored forces outracing horse-drawn food, fuel, and ammunition reserves, and the helicopter assured that more men, and in certain circumstances vehicles, which fell in combat were returned to duty. Finally, mechanization and even mounting infantry in helicopters had assured that the Reich's armored forces could operate with full infantry support, unlike the earlier campaigns where infantry were essentially hamstrung by reliance on their own legs for transport. The result was a doctrine of continuous offense, based on seeking any and every opportunity to upset the enemy and no particular strategic backbone. In comparison to the British system, which stressed hierarchy and could be compared to an elephant, the Reich's land-warfare philosophy was a jellyfish, amorphous and apparently soft, but capabale of stinging anywhere.

The Rudel administration in the Luftwaffe represented a similar change. Rudel had been a prime proponent of new munitions development in South America; when he came to authority and found that the Luftwaffe's doctrine was still primarily based on visual-range engagements, he was furious. An emergency leadership meeting of the Luftwaffe in late January laid out a new program, designed, of all things, off of the Canadian model. The Royal Canadian Air Force was the most modern, forward-thinking air force doctrinally in the world, with an emphasis on delivering their primitive air-to-air missiles well beyond visual range as a way of maximizing survivability for their aircraft. The Luftwaffe had grown so complacent in its technical superiority throughout the 1950s that the average pilot was still trained in the same methods that men like Rudel, Galland, and Generalmajor Werner Moelders had developed and passed on in the early 1940s. Rudel himself had outgrown the Luftwaffe's onetime reliance on dive bombing to prefer high-speed low-level passes; he was absolutely stunned to find that the fighter branch of the Luftwaffe, which Ritter von Greim had supposedly favored, had largely stagnated throughout the former chief's tenure. This would not do - the Jagdwaffe's role in any future war would be to assure that the parachutists and bombers reached their objectives.

Galland therefore headed up a Knight's Cross panel to begin refining German aerial doctrine, resulting in the establishment of the Expertenschule at Memel dedicated to air combat maneuver training. Its first head was Generalmajor Moelders, who had languished in relative obscurity to the general Luftwaffe and Germany as a whole, but had a reputation as a keen doctrinal mind where it mattered - among Galland and his aides. The Expertenschule was fully active by August of 1960, and was equipped with a wide variety of Luftwaffe "aggressor" aircraft painted in colors resembling the old Sowjet air force.

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Figure 141: Expertenschule Gegengeschwader Ta-183

However, the most significant development within Germany in 1960 was the launch of a manned rocket into a suborbital flight. Luftwaffe Oberst Günther Specht made the first manned flight aboard an "Atlas" rocket, breaching the atmosphere before landing successfully in the North Atlantic on March 28, 1960. Like many of the early Raumprogram pilots, Specht had an exceptional body of experience; he had been an active pilot since 1936.

Specht's launch was delayed by interference by American agents late in February, 1960; the launch vehicle was sabotaged by American agents during manufacture. Fortunately, some of the agents involved were captured and placed on trial in Berlin. This trial, the Powers Trial after the lead American captive, a captain named Francis Gary Powers, resulted in the Americans' public conviction for espionage and execution by firing squad. The Americans' bodies were returned to the embassy in Berlin on the same day as the assassination of the American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover by German agents - an act which the Reich made no attempt to hide. Hauptgruppenfuehrer Heydrich instead claimed credit for the assassination on American soil and made the flat statement that "we will deal similarly with any power that interferes with Germany."

This, of course, did nothing to improve American-German relations.

During an election year such as 1960, the American public was especially vulnerable to warmongering; however, with the loss of men like Marshall, it seemed increasingly unlikely that the United States military could make a coherent move against the Reich. Kennedy's apparent war against the United States military leadership did not help this condition. He found himself engaged in continuous verbal sparring with the American Senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, who felt some small obligation to a fellow native of Texas, Admiral Nimitz. Both Johnson and Kennedy were candidates for the Democratic nomination for president; however, Kennedy increasingly cast Johnson as friendly to Texas Germans and by extension Germany as a whole, and pointed out Johnson's lack of experience during the war. Johnson was essentially powerless against the accusations, as Kennedy was far more effective a speaker than the Texan.

During breaks in the campaign, Kennedy probed "the depth of corruption in the United States Army," resulting in the cashiering of a number of generals at corps command level, not least the American parachute and helicopter theorist James Gavin - seen as too close to the Germans in thinking, Gavin was cashiered at a moment when the United States could ill afford to lose forward-thinking officers. Similarly, Kennedy claimed to have uncovered a vast German penetration of the American procurement system, tying together firms like General Dynamics, Chrysler, and IBM in the supposed loss of technological secrets to the Reich. These companies suffered tremendously from Kennedy's probes, losing both civil and military contracts, and turned the armed forces establishment further against Kennedy. The Senator's endless castigation of the US military machine as "too German" and "too soft on Germany" resonated with Americans, though - the average American still felt the losses of 1948 and the late 1950s keenly, and when the United States had declined to intervene in Iceland, Kennedy's response had been savage. The elder Minister von Ribbentrop, nearing the end of his career, summed Kennedy up well in one of his few accurate pronouncements, recorded in his diary: "If that man leads America, we may as well load the missiles now."

As Kennedy toured the United States, he called for a resumption of the stagnant American atomic program, demanded more bombers, asked for a modernization of the United States Navy with the goal of facing both the Reichsmarine and the Royal Navy, and pressed for a closer watch on Canada, with whom the Reich enjoyed very cordial relations during this period. Eisenhower, whose administration was by now thoroughly powerless, could do little to help his chosen successor, Richard M. Nixon of California. Nixon came under Kennedy's suspicion because of his Quaker religion - Kennedy questioned whether a pacifist was what the United States needed. Kennedy pointed to his own combat record in comparison to Nixon's administrative service, asking the American public which they felt would be better suited to stand up to German aggression.

Kennedy secured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, though he was forced to accept Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he personally loathed, as his running mate, after the Democratic convention of July 10-12, 1960. As usual, however, events in America were upstaged by events in Germany.

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Figure 142: Generalmajor Erich Warsitz

Ersatz-Generalmajor der Luftwaffe Erich Warsitz was an extraordinary man by any standards. Born on October 18, 1906, he had sought and obtained licenses to operate virtually any aircraft then extant in the Reich by 1930, from sport aerobatics to commercial airliners. He had spent much of the War Years period as the chief test pilot at Heinkel, albeit with a Luftwaffe commission. In 1939, he had been the first man to fly a rocket-powered aircraft and live, and again to fly a jet-powered aircraft only a month later. The War Years saw him working with Dornberger and von Braun as an engineer and test pilot, a combination which led von Braun to remark to him:

Brigadefuehrer Dr. Wernher von Braun said:
Are you with us and will you test the rocket in the air? Then, Warsitz, you will be a famous man. And later we will fly to the moon – with you at the helm!

Von Braun kept his word. On July 24, 1960, aboard a Messerschmitt-designed re-entry vehicle descended from the wartime Me-163 rocket interceptor at the end of an Atlas missile, Warsitz became the first man to orbit the Earth, staying in space for a full ten orbits before beginning a controlled re-entry. The Messerschmitt design proved nearly uncontrollable in the upper atmosphere, but Warsitz was perhaps the world's most proficient pilot, and the re-entry craft was an excellent glider. The two returned to Earth to land in the German Ukraine after five hours in orbit. Germany had won the Space Race in absolute terms, and showed no sign of yielding her lead. Warsitz had soared into the history books. He was fifty-four years old, and showed no signs of slowing.

Von Braun's next project was again assigned by the Fuehrer himself - a lunar flight by 1965, and a manned orbital station by 1970. It was ambitious even by the standards which had become normal at the Stralsund complex, and von Braun felt it to be a sign of the Fuehrer's concern over his place in history. Nevertheless, both of them had sealed their places in history.

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Figure 143: A rare "civil attire" portrait of Brigadefuehrer Dr. Wernher von Braun, 1960, in his Stralsund office. In the background are mockups of his missile designs.

Against this backdrop, the United States election campaign continued in a climate of near-terror. American citizens believed that the sky could rain German atomic weapons at a moment's notice; the very public expansion of the Reich's rocket forces encouraged this belief. The United States saw its first televised debates shortly after Warsitz returned to Earth; these arguments between Nixon and Kennedy saw the charismatic senator from Massachusetts, fresh and rested, face off against a tired, injured, and ill Nixon in a series of verbal sparring matches whose outcome is still debated. The debates were carefully watched by the RSHA, who put special emphasis on an analysis of Kennedy's foreign policy decisions. The warlike Kennedy was vocal in his demands for a stronger American presence in South America; Nixon, meanwhile, wished to continue the relative peace between Eisenhower and the Reich, believing in balance rather than confrontation. The American public generally agreed with Kennedy, and showed their inclinations on November 8, 1963. In a close-fought election fraught with accusations of corruption and voter fraud - weaknesses from which the Fuehrer had saved Germany - Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Junior was elected the thirty-eighth President of the United States.

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Figure 144: Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., 38th President of the United States, during transition cabinet meeting

Germany took note, and the refitting of the Reichswehr continued unabated. In early December, the Luchs family of vehicles was fully operational, replacing the armored prsonnel carriers, self-propelled guns, and light tanks of the Reichswehr in one of the most massive refits in military history. The Luchs was generally considered equivalent to American main battle tanks of the period, which gave Reichswehr mechanized formations a tremendous edge. This edge was sharpened by the continuing doctrinal evolution of the land forces, emphasizing close interaction with the Luftwaffe to ensure local battlefield superiority.

The last act of the year was, surprisingly, diplomatic. Recognizing that war with the United States was now a matter of when, not if, the Fuehrer recalled the ambassador to the United States, the political moderate Dr. Wilhelm Grewe, to Berlin. His replacement was SS-Brigadefuehrer Rudolf von Ribbentrop. The dispatch of the Knight's Cross awardee and son of the Foreign Minister was delayed to accommodate the younger von Ribbentrop's honeymoon, but he was on hand to present his documents to outgoing President Eisenhower on Christmas Day, 1960. The Fuehrer made no secret of the fact that the younger von Ribbentrop was being groomed as a replacement for his father, who was only a few years younger than the Fuehrer and had been contemplating retiring to write his own memoirs.

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Figure 145: Official Knight's Cross portrait of then-SS-Obersturmfuehrer von Ribbentrop

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OOC: Yes, I know that's a picture of Ted Kennedy, but you try finding pictures of Joe Jr. in the '60s, what with him being twenty years dead and all.
 
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Two points:
-Old Hitler :eek:
-I hate the new President

Speaking of whom...

OOC: Yes, I know that's a picture of Ted Kennedy, but you try finding pictures of Joe Jr. in the '60s, what with him being twenty years dead and all.

You make a very good point.
 
Hitler looks more in his 80's or 90's... :rolleyes:
He lived a quite healthy life, which is quite strange in comparison to the other statesmen of his time. :rolleyes:
Like Druglord Mao, Churchill always with a cigar and his moderate belly and Roosevelt unable to walk later on and Stalin living during nights and smoking and drinking as much as you can. :p

And the ship in the picture looks quite a lot smaller than Yamamoto... :rolleyes:

But still a nice update. :cool: