I just finished catching up to date and this is been amazing so far, and so I award you with my first ever post 
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I just finished catching up to date and this is been amazing so far, and so I award you with my first ever post
Thank you! =D
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Part 20: World War II, Chapter 6: The Siege of Vienna
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Western powers had finally mounted an effective counteroffensive, stalling and even rolling back attempts by Eastern coalition forces to liberate all of Ukraine from the Russian Empire.
But with the fall of Perm to the Qing, the Russians were forced to contend with the incursion of Chinese forces into the area, distracting efforts from their offensive. Not expecting such a rapid Chinese advance through Siberia by a relatively small strike force, which was heavily contrary to conventional Qing doctrine of achieving victory through overwhelming numerical superiority, and with their army busy in Ukraine, the Russians had not been able to implement their usual scorched Earth strategy and the Chinese were able to live off the land.
And back at home in China, a flood of veterans returning home with PTSD and other mental health conditions from the horrific battles sparked a boom in demand for psychotherapy, leading to a drastic increase in interest on the subject. Empress Dowager Cixi approved a draft proclamation mandating the hiring of therapists and psychologists in the military, so as to better prevent and treat mental health conditions among soldiers overseas, and where possible get them back into the field.
But unlike in the past in the Hapsburg domains, there was no ambiguity, no back and forth struggle, not anymore - the Qing were winning, and even more reinforcements had just disembarked from China in preparation for the march on Vienna.
Hearing word that Emperor Ferdinand had effectively abandoned Hungary to the Chinese and announced plans to abolish the dual monarch and reorganize the Habsburg Empire into a confederacy, the last remnants of the Honvedseg refused orders to tend to the defense of Vienna, and continued the struggle against the Chinese. This did not go well for them -though they fought like heroes and in many cases inflicted a more than 2:1 casualty ratio against the Chinese, the Chinese crushed them one by one.
At long last, the two Chinese forces, in Croatia and Budapest, managed to link up, and Empress Dowager Cixi gave the order to begin the final offensive against Vienna.
Meanwhile, Chinese ambassadors in Istanbul presented a proposal before the Ottoman Prime Minister (as the newest dictator was now calling himself), proposing Ottoman representation in the fall of Vienna. The Chinese had noticed that the Ottoman Caliphate was losing legitimacy in the eyes of much of the Muslim world, with many Islamic scholars even outright declaring that the Caliph was now nothing more than a puppet of the Chinese and secular Turkish authorities. The Ottoman Empire's catastrophic weakness in both its economic and military power had not helped matters, with the government having more than once called on Qing aid against rebels. The almost complete absence of Turkish participation in what was the greatest war in all history, despite Turkey's official declaration of war, was such a humiliating exposure of their weakness that it threatened to be the straw that broke the camel's back and completely destroyed the authority of the Chinese tributary.
And so, Empress Dowager Cixi aimed to shore up Ottoman prestige and authority by ensuring Ottoman participation in the final conquest of Vienna. Even the great Suleiman the Lawgiver had failed to achieve that, despite all attempts.
However, the proposal demanded the presence of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a demand that the Prime Minister of the Ottoman Empire found difficult to swallow. Sultan Hamid II very clearly wished to regain autocratic power for the Sultanate, chafing at his status as a purely ceremonial and religious puppet ruler, and the Prime Minister knew this full well. Thus the Sultan had never been allowed to leave the capital, kept in a de facto gilded cage. The Prime Minister offered to come instead, but the Empress Dowager made clear that would not have the intended propaganda benefits.
After intense negotiations, the Prime Minister agreed to the proposal. The Sultan was sent with a small group of "bodyguards", who doubled as prison guards, to join the Qing army. The Chinese had hoped for a more sizable military force, but the Ottomans insisted they had none to offer - reinforcing Qing fears that the Sick Man of Europe was on the verge of total collapse.
Meanwhile, the Austrian plan to defend Vienna was not going well. A sizable detachment of Hapsburg forces was in Ukraine fighting alongside the Russians, and ill disposed towards the idea of having to fight its way past Western armies to reach Vienna. Another Hapsburg army was similarly deployed in Italy, with practically the entire Chinese army standing in the way of any direct route of retreat to Vienna - the only other option being a roundabout path through Western-occupied southern Germany. And Hapsburg forces moving south from Germany had been distracted by the German army, delayed in their return to Vienna.
Thus, General Songgotu Xingde advanced on Vienna unchallenged, with the main surviving Hapsburg army over a week away; only a small garrison remained to hold out against the huge Chinese army. The General, however, heard his spies report that Emperor Ferdinand refused to flee, instead committing himself to go down with Vienna if need be -- an admirable show of courage, the General wrote in his reports to his superiors, but a hopeless one. The Emperor reportedly hoped that large-scale Western relief forces would save the city, just as in the past during Ottoman sieges of Vienna. The General aimed to prove him wrong.
The French and British, however, refused reinforcements - they both had decided to abandon Vienna as a lost cause, and focus on gaining as much ground in Germany and Italy as they could before the Chinese could refocus their attention. But nevertheless, Hapsburg forces under General Walter Miklas attempted to break the siege.
Alas, Qing reinforcements attacked from the east, and the Hapsburgs soon found themselves hopelessly outnumbered. The Chinese were in fact surprised by the small size of the Austrian relief forces - intelligence later revealed that over 36,000 Hapsburg forces in Germany had refused orders to withdraw to Vienna, their General having reportedly decided the capital was lost and he would cast his surviving forces in with the other Western armies.
Meanwhile, border skirmishes on the Far Eastern Front continued, with all Russian offensives crushed, and Eastern armies made a landing on Sakhalin. (I think that's Brunei's flag?) It was becoming quite clear that a Russian push into China's heartland was an impossibility, despite the fact that the Chinese homeland was left relatively poorly defended thanks to the huge amounts of Qing forces deployed overseas.
The Hapsburg relief force soon found itself besieged by General Changlin Linge's reinforcements. Even Afghan forces were pouring into Hapsburg territory via Ukraine. The last of the Honvedseg threatened the outskirts of Budapest, but had no interest in or capability of saving Vienna. British forces and Hapsburg deserters were almost in sight of Berlin itself, and were not about to turn back now. And the French offensive into Germany had stalled thanks to renewed German resistance. There was no hope left among the Austrians, and the Chinese could taste victory.
So Vienna's fate was sealed. Another 20,000 soldiers had arrived to aid the relief force early in the battle, but it had not helped. In a perfect victory, the entire Hapsburg relief force was destroyed completely and utterly. Tens of thousands of surrendering Hapsburgs were led away into Chinese prison camps. The Hapsburg army, in effect, ceased to exist as a unified entity, with the surviving splinter forces defecting to join the commands of the nearest Western armies. It was perhaps the greatest defeat in Austria's entire history.
The siege nevertheless continued for another month, but in the end the Emperor had no choice but to capitulate to Chinese demands for unconditional surrender.
It was a humiliating ceremony. The Emperor formally met General Changlin Linge and Sultan Hamid II, and with photographers at the ready, placed the Imperial Crown of Austria in Sultan Hamid II's hands. The photos spread like wildfire through the world press, encouraged by China's propaganda corps, restoring Ottoman prestige and serving as the greatest humiliation in the Emperor's entire life.
But it was only the beginning of the humiliation. He was forced to sign humiliating terms, agreeing to the total unconditional surrender of the Hapsburg Empire and all surviving Austrian forces, agree to abdicate the title of Emperor to Sultan Hamid II and formally abandon all Hapsburg claims to any and all thrones, (Sultan Hamid II subsequently "gifted" the crown to the Chinese, with General Changlin Linge as Emperor Guangxu's representative, as planned before the ceremony), and any of a number of other conditions, each more humiliating than the last. In return, the Chinese agreed to guarantee his safety and the safety of all Hapsburg family members in Chinese custody, including promising them asylum and a pension in China once the war was over, should they desire it.
Of course, none of the surviving Austrian forces obeyed these orders to surrender, and France, Russia, and Britain all refused to recognize the treaty. Thus, the war was hardly over, even against Austria-Hungary.
But in a very real way the Hapsburg Empire had come to an end. Empress Dowager Cixi called for a day of celebrations in Beijing, and Chinese officials began paving the way for proposals on how to dismantle the now former Hapsburg domains once the war was over, to be presented at the eventual peace treaty negotiations.
And the Sultan Abdul Hamid II returned to Istanbul, with the Ottoman regime able to brag that, in a sense, they had achieved what even Suleiman the Lawgiver had not, and destroyed the Hapsburg Empire. It was later regarded as a turning point in Ottoman history, that began the slow process of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire's power and prestige.
It was also a turning point in the war - and now the Western powers began to fear that Chinese victory was indeed inevitable, just as China had been declaring for months. Empress Dowager Cixi's prestige rose to new heights, and the sense of national pride among Chinese citizens was becoming greater than ever before in Qing history.
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Awesome!
Just story. The game doesn't even allow separate peace treaties in a crisis war. Which is weird since that's pretty much what happened in WWI between Russia and Germany...
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Oh yes oh yes oh yes
I love this so much and will never stop saying I love it.
If only Vicky II worked on steam for mac.
I love this so much and will never stop saying I love it.
If only Vicky II worked on steam for mac.
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Part 21: World War II, Chapter 7: The Eastern Counterattack
After months of delay as the Qing fleet played a cat and mouse game with small surviving Western fleets, the Chinese Empire had finally succeeded in achieving the objective of totally blockading the Atlantic, North Sea, Irish, and English Channel coasts to Western shipping. Already hard hit from the occupation of their colonies, this served to further strangle the economies of both France and England. Moreover, cut off from further reinforcements of supplies and armies from Britain, with Russia still busy fighting in Ukraine, and Vienna having fallen, France now in effect stood alone in the European continent against the combined forces of the Qing, Italy, and Germany, with their only support from their allies being what they had already recieved.
Moreover, the elite Chinese Stormtroopers division (a special army I created whose infantry consists entirely of offensively-oriented Guard unites), which had been steadily advancing through Russia, arrived in the Russian city of Vatkha and won a decisive victory over the Russian Empire. With winter beginning, the Russians had been attempting to scorched-Earth the city and surrounding countryside when the Chinese arrived days earlier than expected, launching a decisive surprise attack that crushed the poorly trained Russian conscript army and successfully secured much-needed supplies for Nalan Xingde's forces.
Xingde had initially been given orders to assist Eastern forces in crushing the Russian army in Ukraine, but the weakness of the Russian army and news arriving from Vienna of the collapse of Austria-Hungary was stoking his ambition, and secretly he began nursing a plan to take St. Petersburg itself.
Nevertheless, the situation for the Eastern powers was still precarious. The Italian army had been smashed to pieces by the French, and most of their population centers in northern Italy were under occupation, with only a Chinese expeditionary force left guarding Rome. In Germany, meanwhile, the loss of both the Rhineland and the entire southern portion of the country risked bringing the nation to the brink of collapse. Even many of the Hapsburg forces were still fighting, albeit under French or British command now. There was no time to pause to celebrate the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Empress Dowager Cixi ordered her generals to immediately begin preparing a counterattack to liberate China's allies from Western occupation.
The city of Munich was one of the first liberated, and German citizens cheered Chinese soldiers as they marched through the city streets and accepted the surrender of the demoralized Austrian garrison.
Chinese military organization and leadership continued to improve under the trials of war.
The war was taking a horrific toll on the peoples of Europe. Thousands of people struggled to make ends meet, or suffered the horrors of foreign occupation, or mourned countless loved ones dead on the field of battle. Many fled to the Americas, the greatest neutral power, seeking safety from the horrors of war, and the Americans accepted them with open arms. But many did not flee - many plotted revolution or rebellion, blaming their governments for starting this war in the first place, or seeking to escape foreign occupation. People increasingly cried out for peace as well around the world, but neither side was willing to surrender just yet.
After winning another decisive battle at Kotlas and seizing the Russian army's military equipment and ammunition, General Xingde announced his plan to his officers - take St. Petersburg. A few objected that this was disobeying orders, but General Xingde remained them that they had been given significant operational flexibility due to the knowledge that communications with them would likely be lost once they were deep enough in Russian territory. Eventually, they agreed to the plan, and General Xingde moved to achieve what he hoped would be the greatest achievement of his career, and hopefully earn him a cushy position with the Qing high command in Beijing.
The demoralized Austrian garrison in Prague finally surrendered before the Chinese advance, and the Chinese announced plans to create an independent nation of Czechoslovakia, with Prague as its capital, and began recruiting collaborators among the Czechoslovak nationalist movement.
The arrival of Chinese forces in the German south helped restore the morale of the German people, weakening the voice of anti-war activists, preventing any Western advance on Berlin from Austria, and freeing German forces to concentrate on a massive counterattack to retake the Rhineland from the French. Later historians would largely agree that former Emperor Franz Joseph I's fateful decision to concentrate on offensives against Budapest and Dalmatia instead of against Berlin had been one of the biggest Western mistakes in the war - if the Berlin had fallen and the German government collapsed at the same time as the Hapsburg government, the Western powers might have at the very least been able to force the Eastern powers to the negotiating table. But with Germany now once again able to pull its own weight in the war, the Chinese under the Empress Dowager Cixi saw no reason to believe Eastern total victory was anything but inevitable.
Western failures only continued to grow as the Empire of Benin invaded French Algeria. Many analysts began to predict that the war was almost over - the only front on which the Western powers weren't in retreat was Canada, and a joint Sino-German push towards Paris seemed only a matter of time. Germany's draft had mobilized an unprecedented number of conscripts, and with Chinese support the Eastern powers would likely have more than enough numbers to overwhelm any Franco-British defense. Even an American entrance into the war would at this point be unlikely to change the balance of power.
Alas, dreams of a grand drive towards Paris had to be shelved for now, as the Chinese found themselves fighting a tedious and bloody counter-insurgency war against Austrian, Hungarian, and Slavic communists who sought to seize the void left by the Hapsburgs and begin a global proletariat revolution.
The Chinese also still had to contend with remnants of the Austrian army, including the disgraced General Walter Miklas, who had somehow escaped the Chinese encirclement in Vienna, and continued to interfere with efforts to persuade remaining Austrian and Honvedseg garrisons to surrender.
And with Italy's army currently virtually nonexistent, the Empress Dowager Cixi decided a drive against Paris would be too risky. She gave the order to focus on consolidating Eastern positions and liberating occupied territory, and advised Germany to do the same.
But General Xingde never received these orders, and continued his seemingly unstoppable advance towards St. Petersburg.
The city of Milan was soon restored to Italian control as the Chinese continued their march into Italy. Here there were no cheering crowds - the Italians had a much dimmer view of China than Germany, considering that not so long ago they had been enemies in another war. Empress Dowager Cixi was particularly incensed at reports that protesters had thrown rocks at Chinese soldiers, and demanded Rome issue a formal apology. With tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers defending Rome against the French (and theoretically capable of taking Rome overnight, or so was the unspoken threat), the Italian government apologized and promised they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but the event only worsened already frosty Sino-Italian relations.
Meanwhile, tensions between the Dutch and the Eastern powers were on the rise. The Dutch refused to abide by the blockade, citing their neutrality and continuing to trade vital war materials to the French. The Belgians had capitulated to Eastern demands to cease such exports, but the Dutch still refused. China was also eager to finally drive the Dutch out of their remaining outposts in the Pacific, and saw this as as good an excuse as any. And so, China began preparing to open a new front in the war.
In a further blow to the Western cause, a coalition of Eastern forces from Afghanistan, Germany, and China had succeeded in liberating Poland. Poland swiftly raised a new army to assist the Eastern powers. (so I was apparently wrong about Poland doing nothing in this war, if that is indeed a Polish army I see at the bottom of this picture; I'm not 100% sure but I don't see anyone else it could be) With Poland freed, the Eastern powers continued their advance into East Prussia.
The French army in Italy, meanwhile, was in full retreat.
As the fall commenced, the situation for the Eastern powers was far more stable than it had been. Word even arrived that to everyone's surprise, St. Petersburg itself was under siege by Qing forces. Emboldened by the victories and believing an offensive into France was now more feasible, Empress Dowager Cixi gave her approval to plans for a Chinese advance into Metropolitan France.
The Germans, too, had freed the Ruhr and were now marching into the Alsace-Lorraine region. Egypt, meanwhile, finally issued a formal declaration of war against the Western powers, and Algeria completely fell to Eastern forces. In effect, virtually the entire continent of Africa was now under Eastern control. (though the Boer states maintained a precarious neutrality)
In non-war news, archaeology in Egypt was booming, with Chinese and Chinese-educated Egyptian archaeologists leading the way, and gaining much prestige for China.
As 1899 began to come to an end, it was clear to all that the Western powers had lost, utterly. The French military was in ruins after further defeats in the Ruhr and Italy, Germany and Italy had been almost totally liberated, Vienna was fallen, and St. Petersburg was under siege. The British and French economies were teetering on the brink of ruin thanks to the Chinese naval blockade. Western ambassadors finally accepted the inevitable and attempted to sue for peace, offering to recognize the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire, recognize Burmese independence, make large-scale concessions in Africa, disarm, and pay reparations, among other terms.
But after the enormous suffering inflicted on Germany and Italy, and the horrific loss of life endured by the other Eastern powers, and with Eastern victory now inevitable, the offers were rebuked. Empress Dowager Cixi declared, with German, Empire of Benin, and Italian support, that nothing less than total unconditional surrender would be acceptable. Such terms were completely unacceptable to the Western powers, who worried that the Eastern powers intended nothing less than an end to their independence, and indeed that was one of the many proposals being considered in secret negotiations among the Eastern powers.
And so, the war moved into a new phase, as the Eastern powers prepared plans to take over metropolitan France and the British Isles.
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How about a mass kowtow? Have all the Western leaders prostrate themselves before the Qing.
Only if you limit it to the sitting heads of state. It could get a bit crowded around the Dragon Throne if the parliaments and ministries had to kowtow as well.
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How about building an Eternal Victory throne just for the occasion? To commemorate the absolute defeat of the West. The throne would of course have enough room around it for mass kowtowing.
Why stop at a throne when you can build an entire Eternal Victory City? It can be populated by people who are just there to kowtow all day.
Long live the Emperor!
I dunno man. As grandiose as Chinese processions are, and as much as Cixi might love to gloat about her victory over the Western barbarians, I think even she would think that excessive. Fomenting long-term resentment between cultures tends to end in tears.
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In a couple of years queen Victoria will die, probably from getting injured performing a kowtow!
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