Home before the leaves fall
A Journal from the Great War.
April 1st 1922.
Dear Maximilian,
Although you have no idea what your father is doing at the moment or have any notion of what a father actually is, I’m afraid that you might never know who I am, and what I’ve been doing. For that reason I’m keeping this journal, starting on the day I’ve heard you were born and write down my experiences for you to read, should I be unable to tell you myself once you’ve grown up.
As your mother would undoubtedly tell you as soon as you start asking, your father is off fighting a war for the German Reich. I hope I will be home soon to tell you this story myself when you get older, but for the moment this will have to do.
The Great War started on July 28th of the year 1914. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by Serbian nationalists the Habsburg Empire declared war on Serbia when they refused their claims. The only reason they did this was because our Kaiser guaranteed our support. Unfortunately for our Kaiser his cousin, Tsar Nicolas, took the whole “being protector of all Slavs” seriously and backed up Serbia.
You might say that war with Russia is a bad thing, mostly because almost everybody that ever decided to wage war on Russia and actually invade got beaten back and were forced to fled with their tails between their legs, Napoleon being the last, a little over a hundred years ago.
Only for us Germans, it got worse. You see, Russia was getting along with France and Great Britain, to the extend of being allied with both. So when we mobilized in reaction to the Russian mobilization, so did the French. After we declared war on the Russians on August 2nd 1914, we also started invading France, declaring war the day later. Because we chose to execute the Schlieffenplan we also invaded Belgium and Luxemburg.
Great Britain wasn’t very amused by us invading countries in their Sphere of Influence, and demanded that we would respect Belgium’s neutrality. When we did not respond to that call Great Britain declared war on us as well.
To get things short, we were in a two front war against the most powerful armies in the world. The Great War, the World war. A big war that devastated the nations of Europe. A war that took millions of lives.
A war that is still raging.
You’re reading this correctly: this damn war is still being fought, nearly eight years since it started. We’ve seen nations fall, rise up, some of them only to fall again. I’m getting sick of this war. The Emperor promised us that we would be home before the leaves would fall from the trees. We all thought it would be when the leaves fell from the trees in 1914, but apparently the Kaiser didn’t.
Believe me when I say that I didn’t expect to be away from home this long when I decided to sign up. Fresh out of school, barely eighteen years old. I was dreaming of adventure, honor, glory and fame and what better place to get it then the army?
After basic training I was placed in a small infantry regiment near the border with Luxembourg. A week later I had killed my first man, and we took the capital. The Kaiser annexed the little country a day later.
Your father after the siege of Luxembourg. Don't a look adventurous?
After the Anschluss of Luxembourg we rushed trough Belgium, cornering their armies in Brussels and Bruges, and annihilated them. We were expecting to annex them as well, however King Albert decided to flee and continue his battle from the Congo. The Generalstab and the Kaiser anticipated this, already dispatched the Sudwest Afrika Korps to Leopoldville as soon as we invaded Belgium. They arrived a few weeks later, capturing the King and allowing all Belgian lands to be ceded to the German Reich.
In a surprise move the French declared war on Switzerland, but were unable to penetrate the Alps and conquer the Swiss, who joined our alliance.
After smashing trough Belgium and Luxembourg we met the French, who had by now set up an impressive amount of defenses at their borders. The Kaiser decided that we had to break the French at all costs, pulled back eighty percent of the troops in the east, moved those that remained further back from the border and had them establish a defensive line a few hundred kilometers from Berlin, leaving almost all of Eastern Prussia undefended.
Defensive lines in Eastern Prussia
The Russians exploited this gap and encircled and destroyed a huge part of the Austrian army. The Austrians retreated, formed a defensive line further inland and focused on destroying Serbia and Montenegro.
The troops shipped in proved the be decisive. In the spring of 1915 we started our offensive on the French lines at almost any place. Wave after wave, day after day we charged their lines and finally they broke after a few months. What remained was a mop up of what was left of the French army and whatever the British Empire had shipped in from their Dominions.
Although we had all but defeated the Entente Italy decided to join the Entente. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire joined our alliance and started preparing for the invasion of Russia.
By the Summer of 1915 the Entente with the exception of Russia surrendered, signing a harsh peace treaty at Versailles. We gained a lot of French possessions in Africa, war reparations and the former lands of Belgium and Luxembourg were now considered a part of Germany.
As soon as the treaty was signed, the Generalstab withdrew our troops and deployed them to the east and some to Austria, to help conquer the Serbs.
However, since it already became the end of the summer, and winter was at the door, the assault into Russia was halted to start the next spring. A small portion of our troops fought the Serbs together with the Austrians. The Serbs were finally conquered in early 1916 but by then the Austrian armies were exhausted and battered, and the populace was near open revolt.
The Kaiser deemed Austria a lost cause and withdrew our armies from Austrian soil. A month later the Russians had overrun the dual monarchy and Kaiser Karl surrendered and fled to live in exile in Berlin.
Although the Kaiser retreated from Austria, he laid claims on all former lands of the Hapsburg Empire. By doing this he angered his minister of foreign affairs, who resigned after announcing the Kaisers claims. He appointed a new minister of foreign affairs, an Austrian born former colonel named Adolf Hitler.
This Hitler however, was as expansionist as the Kaiser and his first act would be to announce that all nations that formed from the former Austrian-Hungarian lands were unlawful and would be swiftly brought under German rule.
As soon as the new Nations of Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Croats and Serbs, Hungary and Albania declared independence, the Kaiser declared war.
The Balkan war was really not worth mentioning. The new nations barely had time to form an army and were overrun by the winter of 1916. The only mentionable effort came from Romania, who declared war and took a stand with the former Hapsburg nations, and went down with them.
By then it was winter, and our troops redeployed to the Russian frontline, waiting their time. By now the Kaiserreich encompassed half of Europe, and a lot of overseas possessions.
The German population however, was getting tired of the war. They weren’t prone to revolt, we were only partially mobilized after all, and most of our production went into consumer goods to keep them happy. However, having half of every able bodied men in your country away from home does make their families restless.
It’s strange. We are mostly fighting with the same amount of regiments and brigades since the war started. The Kaiser let the navy built some U-boats, but that was about it. We got supplied with replacements en the occasional equipment upgrade, but that was it. no new regiments, no extra artillery, no armored cars what so ever. It must be said that the German army is one of the best in the world, being able to beat half the world and take on the other half without expanding your armed forces is a feat. No one can deny that.
But now we have arrived at the spring of 1917. Our spring invasion, the grand assault on Mother Russia. And we killed Russians, but still the charged our lines. We killed more Russians, and even more came charging back, so we gave them an artillery bombardment that leveled their towns, ruined their lands and killed their sons and daughters and still those verdammte Russian kept coming! For every Russian we killed ten more seemed to take his place. The Russian soldiers were underfed, I’ll equipped and poorly trained but Mein GOTT, they were legion. Our soldiers bled for every inch of ground we conquered but steadily we pushed them back. This continued for a year and by the summer of 1918 we had advanced well into the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. We estimated to reach both Petrograd and Moscow within a few months.
Fate, however, decided otherwise. Being threatened with revolt the Tsar decided to abdicate the throne and a transitional federal Government was founded. It seemed that Nicolas only wanted to abdicate if the other entente powers declared war on the Reich again.
They did. And they caught us unprepared.
The entire western front was vacant, all available armed forces were fighting in the east. The French and Italians did not waste time and started to invade, this time, the only line of defense, Switzerland, fell within two months.
Entente forces during as Swiss counter-attack
The Kaiser was outraged by the betrayal. He order an immediate and all out assault on the Russian positions and not to stop chasing them. When we finally broke the Russians, and were able to keep the pressure on them the amount of troops needed on the Eastern front decreased, and a lot of them were sent back to the western front. By then, winter 1918, the French and Italians had annexed Switzerland and made them a puppet nation, released Belgium and Luxembourg and captured Stuttgart, Aachen and Cologne.
This gave the Portuguese some confidence that the Germans weren’t invincible and declared war, attacking our colonies. The colonies were decided to be unimportant to defend as long as our troops were needed in Europe, only local militia were deployed to harass enemy forces.
The idea is simple. Every enemy soldier deployed overseas, can’t kill one in Europe.
Our troops arrived at the Western Front and resumed operations in the east in the spring of 1919. The Entente had used the time the treaty had given them to upgrade their army, nearly bringing it on par with the German Imperial Army. They were now prepared for us. In the west we slowly but steadily pushed back the French into Belgium, bringing in more troops that were freed from the Eastern front as continued to force the Russians back.
As the winter arrived again, and fighting in the East decreased the troops on the eastern front were allowed to regain their strength and be reinforced. However, the winter in the west wasn’t really that cold and the fighting continued.
In the spring of 1920 we had reclaimed Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland, and were starting to invade France again. The Italian front remained a cat and mouse game, the Italians capturing another province as soon as we liberated another. The Balkan theater needed reinforcements, and the Kaiser and his staff decided to halt the offensive in northern France, let our troops dig in, and ship a lot of troops to the Italian front.
Stormroopers (such as I am) assaulting French lines
It bears no surprise that when King Winter came around again, the Italians sued for peace, ceding their overseas territories to us.
Strangely the Kaiser decided to grant Libya and Somalia their independence, hopefully allowing them to contribute troops to the war. Unfortunately the Kaiser seemed to overlook the fact that such an army needed to be built and trained first, and that his own army wasn’t able to protect these new states and Libya was annexed by the British within two months.
Now that the Italian front was gone, it seemed that the courage of the Entente was fading, revolts broke out in France and a coup was staged in Russia. A new form of government, a Soviet, a government run by the peasants and workers of a country took force and declared that they were neither at peace nor at war with us. As soon as it seemed they were firmly in control, they offered peace to the Kaiser.
The Kaiser declared there would be no peace, a country run by peasants was a danger to the world stage and he would smash it in the ground. A few days later Minister Hitler held a speech, declaring that the Kaiser deemed all that lived in the former Russian lands to be under his protection and should either lay down their arms and join the Reich or declare independence and fight the communists. Any country who declared independence would have it’s sovereignty guaranteed by the Kaiser.
Sure this seemed noble, but to me it just meant that the war would last years longer. Considering that rebellions in occupied parts of former Russia were still smashed by our forces most of the men in the army thought the Kaisers call was just aimed at starting rebellions in Russia to give the Russian armies more fronts and fight to worry about.
Almost immediately his plan backfired as Lithuania declared independence. Although the German army occupied those lands, legally and formally they were still soviet lands. Luckily for the Kaiser another nation, much more further to the east, declared independence from Soviet rule and declared war on them a few weeks later, after having fielded their first army.
By now it was summer 1921 and we spent it pushing the Russians and the Entente back and by the fall of 1921 we had captured Paris. Again. A few skirmishes happened after that, the most significant the British invasion of Albania. The British gained a foothold, but it was contained before it could expand en turn into a problem. The winter of 1921 was littered with skirmishes and the quelling of uprisings, but for every province we take from the partisans, they take another from us. It’ll be long before we’ll have solved our partisan problem.
German Soldiers at the frontlines containing the British beachheads in the Balkans
The above is a summary of what happened so far in the Great War. Although I never thought it would take so many lives and years to end. This pretty much sums up every major event from the war so far. Undoubtedly you will eventually have to learn about it in school, but that is never as good as hearing it from someone who has experienced it. The world looks very German at this point.
The most recent map of Europe. It speaks for itself.
Now I’ve told pretty much everything there is to tell to this point. I will fill this journal up every once in a while to give you some details on what my life looks like.
Your father.