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"One and Indivisible" (A Russian Kaiserreich AAR)

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I would be delighted to see this AAR continue!!

Admittedly there was a time when current events caused me to kind of, well, feel at unease thinking about alternate universes with super large, super powerful Russian empires that dominate the 20th century and boss other nations around like it's no thing, and where there troops are regularly greeted with flowers and bread baskets after invading small countries. It felt too much like a dream version of what certain toxic people in the real world thought our present time should be like. But that feeling has passed and I can again separate fiction from reality :)

Slava Ukraini in the real world, God save the czar this world ;)
 
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JodelDiplom said:
I would be delighted to see this AAR continue!!

Admittedly there was a time when current events caused me to kind of, well, feel at unease thinking about alternate universes with super large, super powerful Russian empires that dominate the 20th century and boss other nations around like it's no thing, and where there troops are regularly greeted with flowers and bread baskets after invading small countries. It felt too much like a dream version of what certain toxic people in the real world thought our present time should be like. But that feeling has passed and I can again separate fiction from reality :)

Slava Ukraini in the real world, God save the czar this world ;)
Click to expand...
Had we been at the beginning of the AAR when Russia was defending against Totalist Ukraine's invasion continuing it might have been a bit more problematic, but ultimately ah communities here and elsewhere have benefitted from an unspoken understanding that these stories are primarily to examine history going differently, rather than to make political statements about the world of today.
 
I like the smell of misery in the morning :cool:

Subcontinental misery, perchance? Or some misery from the "new southern states" of Comrade Browder's happy and united family of socialist states?
 
376: Escalation - Part 1​

“The enforcement of rules or norms in warfare is an unnatural but essential thing. The conventions on which we rely to regulate the most desperate activities can only be founded on one thing, an understanding that a failure to adhere to those rules will invite the most terrible retribution.

Such atrocities must be met in some kind, or it is our assessment they shall escalate with impunity." - Duma defence committee discussion note, late 1951

“Our enemy has no reason to stop, not unless he can be made to understand our unbreakable resolve. If he believes we can be battered into surrender, as so many have been before us, then he will stop at no border - he will roll on until he reaches Calcutta and ends the revolution here.

If we do not demonstrate absolute, iron-clad resolve - if we do not prove our wilinngess to offer our blood, and our souls, to the struggle, then we will all live to see three hundred million souls shackled once more as slaves to a medieval regime.

I have provided the means by which such resolve can be left beyond all doubt. It falls now to this body to endorse its employment, to cross with me the Rubicon standing between us and our enduring path to final victory.” - Oswald Mosley, October 1951

From “The Road to Lucknow”​

The monsoon season of ‘51 put a halt to the rapid planned and unplanned advances of the Imperial forces in India, but did little to halt the rapidly spiraling tensions and hostilities at the political level.

In Europe, the challenges of poorly coordinated coalition operations and the near disaster they had brought during the Red offensive finally galvanised Berlin to relinquish its objections to the formation of the Organizatsiya Dogovora o Kollektivnoy Bezopasnosti or Collective Security Treaty Organisation in late June 1951. The new organisation provided a framework for collective action by the various Imperial blocks in the case of their collective security being threatened.

Lacking the various arms and bureaucratic structures that would later grow out of it, the first incarnation of the CSTO was an unambiguously security focused organisation. It had only three arms, a congregation of the organisation’s full membership, an executive responsible for identifying and acting against threats to collective security (with certain privileged members holding the power of veto over collective military action) and a military command staff intended to help smooth joint operations in times of war.

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In Europe, the formation of the CSTO was portrayed as a natural response to potential renewed Red aggression and a symmetrical response to the old Internationale security structures.

In Chicago, it was seen as a dangerous consolidation of the Imperial alliances who had drifted apart since the 1940s. The organisation’s founding documents made clear that the organisation had no role in preventing or acting in disputes between members - a concession insisted on by Germany - which seemed to prove that the body’s focus was on America and global revolutionary forces.

In Calcutta, the CSTO’s founding was perceived with even greater alarm, as the Empire of Japan was invited, and acceded to being, one of the founding, permanent members of the organisation’s Executive (alongside the United Monarchy, and the Russo-Roman and German Empires). With Japanese troops appearing in greater numbers in Thailand month by month for ‘joint exercises’ anxiety ran high of a threat to the Eastern flank of the Indian giant.

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In New York, the Internationale carried a motion condemning the creation of ‘yet another alliance of imperial and reactionary power’ and diplomats from Chicago and Saint Petersburg worked quietly to try and tamp down the fanning tensions.

But political developments would, as is so often the case, be overtaken by military ones.

Towards the end of Markov’s pre-monsoon offensive, Red forces had, in desperation, deployed some of their limited stockpile of nerve agents to stymie local offensive actions. Initially, strict orders that only Dominion troops should be targeted were mostly adhered to, with some commanders going further and targeting only majority Muslim formations after facing reluctance from their troops to engage fellow Hindus, but the pressures of war and the devastation of the British Republican units that had served as the security forces controlling the weapons soon breached this discipline.

A massive overreaction to an armed reconnaissance by a predominantly Italian United Monarchy unit during a break in the monsoonal rains resulted in the deaths of two dozen Italian troops.

The media in Rome exploded with the news. Never under quite the same ‘discipline’ that the Russo-Roman press operated under, the Italian print media drummed up stories of atrocities committed by barbaric reds, stories often not so subtly couched in religious terms. With the United Monarchy’s hold over its new form so new and tenuous, Vienna felt it had no choice but to respond with force to demonstrate that it did not regard the lives of its Italian subjects as worth any less than the Germans, Hungarians, or Slavs.

The debate over Strategic Bombing in Europe had remained uncomfortably frozen in a largely theoretical state through the 1940s. The USSA, UoB, and RRE had all played host to prolific air-power theoreticians who had long advanced the idea that opposing powers might be brought to heel through the systemic destruction of population centers by means of area bombing. Military industrial complexes had been called on to design aircraft to carry out the mission, and training and doctrine had been developed.

But, as with chemical weapons, the deliberate obliteration of urban centres by bombers had not become a major part of the European battles. Both sides had their reason to respect the unspoken norm, and to loudly condemn any attacks by an opponent that could be seen to stray over the line. In the quick air-land battles of the Solar Offensives, there had been no need to destroy industrial centres, while in Britain, the Imperial forces had relied more on the power of naval blockade and destruction of transportation targets outside residential zones to degrade Mosley’s economy and military. Starvation had come to Britain, but her cities had never been put to the torch.

Even as American trans-Atlantic sorties to posture against Imperial cities in Europe grew more frequent, there was a belief that even Browder would be unwilling to resort to undoing the unspoken compact that had survived in Europe (if not America during its invasion of Canada and the Royalist bombardment of New York).

But the use of gas had crossed a line, at least in the eyes of the European public - and military theoreticians and politicians alike argued that only a visible escalation could discourage further atrocities. The voices against were tamped down by the political realities of an outraged populous and the unique dimension of fighting a war against an enemy as ‘different’ as the Indian Maximists.

On the night of August 7th, 52 aircraft of KG-19 “Aquila” targeted the railway station and yards in the city of Nasik. Their bombs did some damage to the railway yards, but the intermixed incendiaries started fires that continued to burn across the city well into the next day.

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In Saint Petersburg, pressure built for a sign of support for Vienna, as did the argument that the centre of power for the Indian Maximists were, in fact, the nation’s urban agglomerations, rather than the rural areas suffering most from the ongoing fighting. With some hesitation, two hundred heavy bombers would fly from Tibet on August 20th to launch a strike on the chemical storage fields in Calcutta.

The raid, the first long distance raid carried out by the RRE’s new jet bombers made several hits on the storage tanks, setting of leaks and detonations that would cause significant secondary casualties in the historic city and shock the Maximist leadership there who were increasingly fielding opposition from other factions in the countryside for what was increasingly seen to have been a failed military gambit.

The strike on Calcutta killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more, and prompted a string of fiery declarations from the Red leadership in India, while in New York pressure mounted for increased American involvement in response.

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Privately citing the impossibility of being seen to ‘reward such an abominable deviation from the rules and norms of war’ the USSA delegation that had been working towards a ceasefire arrangement in India was forced to suspend their efforts with their European Counterparts.

The erosion of peace-talks was not universally welcomed in Europe, where many had hoped that the crushing successes of the first great counter-offensive in India would have been enough to bring the matter towards a close. But many commentators and public figures, tasting blood and sensing weakness, gladly set about cheering for the next round of offensives as soon as the weather began to clear. By October, they declared, the weather would support a renewed action, while their opponent was now denied much of his known stock of nerve agents (incinerated or released as they now were).

For the Calcuttan leadership, the months of August through October were dominated by desperate efforts to integrate arriving American arms shipments with freshly conscripted troops against a backdrop of increasing grumbling and resistance from rural leaders who were increasingly targeted by Imperial psychological operations.

Come October they had pushed hundreds of thousands of new bodies into the line or into territorial and militia units ready to steady against the coming drive.

It was woefully insufficient for the task at hand.

Reconstituted Dominion forces advanced behind Imperial spearheads as the lines steadied only by rain and logistical demands shattered as those two braking factors faded away. Word of an upcoming German naval invasion launched from Ceylon in the barely defended South grew from rumour into clear and present danger, while Japanese diplomats began issuing a series of increasingly impossible to meet ultimatums even as capital ships began appearing in ever greater numbers off the Indian Coast.

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The hope for Chicago and Calcutta was that the Imperial forces would halt once they reached the border of the old Dominion, which they had largely managed by the last quarter of 1951. When Imperial troops broke the taboo by advancing towards the capital of the old Princely State of Raighar, with a new puppet ruler ready and in tow, it became clear that boundary would not be respected.

Chicago asked for a week to set a demand for de-escalation before the European powers, coupled threats if de-escalation was not forthcoming (even as Browder set a number of his own contingencies into motion).

In Calcutta, the American request was received, considered, and ignored.

With the enemy entirely capable of threatening the capital if matters did not rapidly improve, they adopted a different approach, with the aid of Comrade Oswald Mosley.

Princely State of Raighar

November 9th - 1951​

The punishing wash of the Sikorski’s rotors punished Kovalenko and the rest of the medical team as the engines spun down. Small stones and flecks of dirt from the hastily prepared landing spot flew in every direction, spattering across the poor team of officers and enlisted that rushed forward to meet them.

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The makeshift landing zone and medevac point was dominated by the noise of helicopter rotors and the occasional moans of the sick and the wounded. There were dozens, prepared on stretchers under sun-shades, now being brought forward by bearers to be loaded into the fat-fronted helicopters. Dozens…perhaps as many as a hundred.

“I had been told there were a dozen presenting with symptoms, not…this” Kovalenko yelled as the receiving medical officers met him. He didn’t get the name, some Central-Asiatic nonsense, all he got were the details.

Presentations were becoming more widespread, the same difficult to diagnose symptoms as the previous unit.

It was that last point that had convinced Corps to send Kovalenko out for a look. This sector had been held by the 41st Delhi Rifles, before they’d reported losing fully half their number sick in a matter of a week. Poor hygiene and diet among the native troops had been blamed, and so they’d been withdrawn to be replaced by the 221st Motor-Infantry. They’ve been careful to avoid interaction with the withdrawing unit, had avoided local food and water sources….but within days of arrival and forty eight hours out from an offensive…this had started.

“Let me see them”

The sick were laid out under shade, stern faced and quiet even as shakes and the smell of it all hinted at the truth.

“I was told they presented with lesions?”

The nurses dutifully removed the white coverings from one of the near most cases.

For a moment, Kovalenko could not process what his eyes showed him. The man’s body was a mess of black lesions, patches where the flesh seemed to have sunken and taken on the appearance of boiled rubber.

He marched through the other symptoms in his head, hoping desperately to avoid the same conclusion that had gotten the local medical officers disciplined for alarmism and told to await a representative from Corps.

They were probably already… fuck

Kovalenko’s eyes looked all around himself in panic. Troops by a helicopter drinking water from canteens, nurses taking just a moment to sit on the grass before returning to work handling the sick men.

“And you’ve had cases showing influenza like symptoms?”

More every hour had been the reply, and Kovalenko felt his own breathing slow as a result.

He turned around and marched right back towards the helicopter. He couldn’t give this report by radio, and he wasn’t staying here a moment longer than he needed to.

Who gave the Indians fucking Anthrax?​
 
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Will Calcutta end up being the first city in the world to get nuked ? Will Mosely meet his end in the nuclear holocaust instead of at the hands of the throne’s executioner ? Tune in next time to find out.
 
Anthrax is bad,but the fact that biological weapons was used and can be continued to be used will not only give moral ground to the CSTO,it will destroy whatever internal coesion left in the commune
 
Wow this war is notably much more ugly than Korea. It's rich of the Syndicalists to claim of Russian bombings killing their civilians when the civilians were killed by their own gas those bombings released.
 
The shock army rolling forward like that was a shocking development.

Meanwhile Mosley has become this universe's version of Kane from Command and Conquer.
If you actually use the nuclear option I can actually imagine him being mentioned as missing when the temple of nod I mean party headquarters got disintegrated in the blast:p.
 
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