The First Day
The conventional military offensives of the Third Weltkrieg commenced with the execution of the carefully prepared ‘De Gaulle Plan’ which, based on De Gaulle’s doctrine of mobile warfare, aimed to overrun north France and assume defensive positions along the Franco-German border before the German war machine could mobilise.
In north Africa, in what would remain only a small theatre of the war, the French Empire launched an offensive from Algeria into German Morroco with the goal of securing the port of Marrakech and sealing Africa off from Central Power combatants.
But the main south French offensive took place near Poitiers where the first and second armies of the French Empire advanced behind six tank divisions which had quite literally driven through the Occitan Wall in an assault aimed at smashing a hole in north French lines to allow the south French to wheel round to the east and roll up the entire north French defensive line along the Occitan Wall.
With 600,000 men on the south French side being brought to bear on just 60,000 north French defenders it seemed to the imperial French generals that the planned breakthrough was imminent.
This was timed to coincide with the mass dropping of airborne aeroporteé divisions at key locations in north France. With the Royal French Army massed along the Occitan Wall the airborne regiments were able to secure the key ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre intact and almost unopposed - as well as seizing Nantes and cutting off the main route out of the Brittany peninsula for the north French corps defending the naval bases there.
To the north, in the Channel, the Imperial French first fleet under Grand Admiral D’Argenlieu clashed with the Royal French navy in the Battle of the Channel Islands which resulted in the sinking of almost the entire Royal French Navy at the hands of the imperial fleet which survived the battle with only minor damage to its ships and no ships lost - a testament to the superior naval technology of the French Empire.
Most significantly, this naval victory cleared a window for the safe transfer across the Channel of French troops stationed in southern England to the recently captured port of Le Havre - placing them within reach of the lightly defended city of Paris and the north French government.
But the greatest south French offensive took place to the east where six atomic hydrogen bombs mounted on V2 rockets rained down on targets across Germany.
Berlin, capital of the German government and home of the Kaiser, Kongsberg, the capital of East Prussia and coronation seat of the Hohenzollern Kings of Prussia , Essen, site of the famous Krupp artillery and munition works, Stuttgart, centre of German engineering and military research, and the Kiel Canal, home of the Kaiserliche Marine, were all destroyed.
In Berlin, where two bombs fell, the results of the bombing were the instant destruction of the Reichstag building, the Brandenburg Gate and the entirety of the historic old city as well as the factory districts. The death toll in the first week was one and a half million from the blast, radiation and the resultant firestorm. Amongst the dead were included almost the entire German government and Reichstag members, along with much of the German imperial family and Kaiser Willhelm III himself.
Kaiser Willhelm III von Preussen of Germany. Reign: 4 June 1941 – 18 March 1951
The cities of both Koenigsburg and Stuttgart were almost completely vaporised and reduced to a flattened, featureless moonscape - along with 400,000 civilians across the two cities.
Essen too, was completely destroyed, ripping the heart out of the Ruhr and destroying in an instant the Krupp plants, home of German panzer tank manufacture, along with most of the Krupp industrial dynasty itself and 350,000 of the city’s inhabitants - as well as overwhelming much of the Ruhr with refugees and taking thousands of men away from the factories to fight, with improvised tools, the firestorm which threatened to spread beyond the shattered remnants of Essen.
In Kiel, not only was the famous military canal sealed with tens of thousands of tonnes of radioactive rubble, but much of the Kaiserliche Marine was caught in the blast at harbour - the greatest navy in the world being reduced to a third rate navy at best in a matter of minutes as the hulls of the ships melted in the heat and their crews were either incinerated or killed by massive doses of radiation poisoning.
However, as the bomb was targeted at the naval harbour, casualties were comparatively light - “only” 100,000 of whom most were military personnel.
The consequences of the attack were both immediate and long lasting. One of the most significant immediate outcomes was to convince Poland, already in receipt of south French provinces regarding the return of Silesia and Poznan, to declare the dissolution of its alliance to Germany and its assumption of a state of “armed neutrality”, cutting Ukrainian forces off from their German allies.
Even more significantly, the deaths of Kaiser Willhelm III (though not his heir) and the democratically elected SDP government of Germany created a power vacuum which would swiftly be filled by the conservative and Prussian aristocrat dominated German military - the only national institution which, although damaged, had survived the atomic bombing of Germany without the complete destruction of its command structure.
This was crucial to the future of Germany for the remainder of the war for, while a civilian government would almost certainly have come to a negotiated peace after the atomic bombing, the new de facto military rulers of Germany were so enraged with what they saw as the barbaric massacre of the imperial family and the destruction of centres of German pride and national culture that they were quickly swept up into a vengeful fervour which drowned out any arguments in Germany other than that for brutal vengeance through the defeat of the national enemy and the execution of every single member of the south French government.
These were the results of the atomic bombing of Germany. Yet the De Gaulle Plan outlined the objectives of the attack as simply the “disruption of German mobilisation and command and control, as well as the reduction of enemy morale”.
With five cities destroyed this objective was undoubtedly fulfilled. At the cost of almost two million dead in the first 24 hours of the war, with tens of thousands more to follow in the next few days and weeks through the slow deaths of radiation poisoning.
