Part XVIII: December 1936
December begins, and the battle of Toledo still proceeds. Although we get another positive battle event, the Republicans still stand their ground. I would have used my air force at this point to speed the battle progress up, but due to the rebasing to Valencia they again lost some organisation, while Republican planes frequently show up and make any air force intervention dangerous. The battle of Madrid at some point becomes even more successful for the attackers than the battle of Toledo. It is only a question of time.
In the south, the NAF are, as expected, defeated by the Republicans, but as the SAF under Franco's command are only hours away from Albacete, the Republicans will not be able to move divisions to Toledo in the meantime to relief their strained forced. I later order the NAF, as soon as they have reorganized a bit, to move to Murcia to protect the province, as it could be easily seized by the four Republican divisions stationed in Almeria.
Then, on the 12th of December, 1936, the disaster happens that leads to the eventual failure of the encirclement: We win the battle of Madrid. We have beaten the Republicans in Madrid before we have won in Toledo, so the divisions in Madrid start their retreat to Toledo -- that is not about to be encircled in any way -- and won't be destroyed. Yes, now even the time has come to start weeping about victories. The catastrophe and subsequent escape of five virtually doomed Republican divisions is solely based on my own ignorance and incompetence, or to be more precise, on a false assumption I already expressed some time before:
The battle in Madrid will also cause the destruction of the three retreating divisions in Segovia, as provinces with ongoing battles will count as hostile provinces -- I think, because otherwise I couldn't explain their subsequent disappearance (if anyone has deeper knowledge about this topic, I would be glad to listen).
Obviously this was not the case
here, otherwise all five divisions would have been destroyed. Instead, they're now just moving to Toledo and as soon as the battle is concluded there with another victory, they will again escape together with the other Republican divisions from Toledo. This is not only awful and embarassing, it's just confusing. I know from HoI and AoD that provinces with ongoing battles do not count as hostile provinces,
of course, and that it is always necessary to capture all provinces that border the target province(s) of the encirclement. However, based not only upon the one observation that I cited before, but also on some similar events during my test games, I thought that this was somehow changed in DH and that the rule I mentioned before, almost a natural law in HoI and AoD, would no longer apply, considering the abundance of empirical observations I made. OK, we now know that this is apparently not always true, that the rule still applied here and I therefore failed to encircle the divisions -- however, this does not explain why, for example, the divisions in Segovia disappeared as soon as they had been defeated and their only escape would have been a province with an ongoing battle. The only way I can imagine at this moment to explain this inconsistencies would be that their strength dropped a microsecond before their defeat to zero, resulting in their destruction, but that also begs the explanation why their strength has dropped so much in the end.
Unfortunately I don't have a save to investigate it in more detail. Anyway, feel free to speculate, to come up with a better explanation or to debunk all I have written before as nonsense due to an obvious crux I forgot. If you should have learned one thing from this AAR, than that it is in DH still necessary to capture all provinces before you encircle.
I also want to point out that this would be an
excellent opportunity for a reload -- it would be so simple to go back in time and just retreat one corps from the battle of Madrid, thus postponing the victory in Madrid until Toledo is captured. I freely admit that I was seriously thinking about breaking my own rules at this point, after this frustrating series of failures, but before I even started to stop myself with the thought that it would be a despicable betrayal of myself and my readers, a message popped up:
4:00 December 13, 1936: Abyssinia won a battle against Italy in Dire Dawa.
I will not fall
that low.
Scarcely one day later we defeat the Republicans in Toledo and occupy the province, while all Republican divisions, probably fiendishly laughing due to the successful execution of their conspiration against me, start their retreat to the neighboring provinces. I again want to stress that this all sounds and appears more worse than it actually is; the victories are still victories, even if bitter ones, and I doubt that the Republicans will survive the next three to four months. We probably won't see any artistic warfare in the SCW anymore, and with the capture of Madrid and Toledo I declare (still ashamed) the end of Stage III, although in fact my whole plan slowly died.
Edit (thanks to soulking): After being retreated from Albacete the NAF under the command of Field Marshal Mola Vidal arrived just in time in Murcia to prevent a Republican takeover of the province by the divisions in Almeria. Franco was indeed used as a replacement for Mola Vidal and the battle in Ciudad Real, that was initially only a delay battle, is still going on with Franco's SAF.
Germany also required some attention in the meantime: With the beginning of the final quarter of the year I decided that we would start to research some useful 1937 technologies as soon as the next tech slot became available. The continuing research of 1936 troopships is definitely not something that helps to improve my mood. The research penalty from researching technologies before their historical date can be taken during the last quarter of the year if the technology in question is a useful one, and should be taken if it has paramount importance. So I.G. Farben now researches Agrichemistry, a tech that will raise our industrial efficiency and the efficiency in producing supplies by two percent, while Messerschmitt researches 1937 Interceptors; I don't build any province improvements that will help me in containing the Allied air force, so modern interceptors are without alternative.
The British have at some point decided to sabotage I.G. Farben, which will delay our additional IC a bit. I either need better counter espionage or luck; as I'm clearly not going to get the latter due to my proven bad karma, I might after all decide to over-produce consumer goods in order to raise my intelligence level, if I can combine it with a useful minister change in January 1937.