“So class. It was less than a year ago, so some of you should remember: how did the war start?”
Cue silence. Mr. Johnson never did get much response to his questions, as if answered incorrectly they would meet with a fearsome put-down.
“Smith!”
“Um, them bourgeois wanted to steal Luxembourg.”
“If by ‘them bourgeois’you mean His Most Catholic Majesty Louis XX, his Cabinet and advisers and the Estates General, and by ‘steal Luxembourg’ you mean demanding that the European Soviets withdraw recognition from the Luxembourg Peoples’ Soviet permitting Bourbon troops to march in and seize so-say traditionally French territory, this would be correct.”
Little Tommy Smith relaxed; he’d made it through that one.
Of course Mr. Johnson’s eagle eye caught him relaxing and so he got a follow-up.
“What state were the People’s Armed Forces in at this point?”
“Nobody’s sure, sir. They’d been mobilising, that’s when me dad got called up, but his unit was still on Salisbury Plain when the war started.”
“Good enough Smith. Sit down.”
Johnson sighed to himself. He was naturally inclined to teach the oldest pupils, those whose minds could be expanded by his insights into politics and modern history. However, the young Mr. Jones had volunteered for the Army, and so here he was, lumbered with a bunch of 11-year-olds.
The thing was, Tommy Smith was depressingly close to correct. Tensions had been building since the end of the Revolution Wars in 1917, but the trigger had been the Bourbon demanding that the European Soviets recognise the right to self-determination of little Luxembourg.
The Soviets had of course refused; Luxembourg’s resources were integral to the industry of the entire Continental Belt, and there had only been a few riots…there’d been as much in Toulouse a few years ago.
When Versailles’ ultimatum expired, the Proletarian International had of course declared in favour of their ally the European Soviets…he could only imagine the cursing in Teheran when the Persians realised how surrounded they were.
The Prussian-Russian Axis had realised they would not survive against the victor between the bourgeois and proletarians, and so they had joined the war against both.
The Soviets had transported the entire Armoured Spearhead to the Continent, and had also stripped a good half-dozen divisions from the British Isles, leaving a bare minimum to defend against invasion. As the slogan went, "The People In Arms Need No More Defence." The odd fact, for a propaganda slogan, was that it was being put into practice...
The initial intention had been an immediate thrust to reach Roma’s northern border, allowing a direct co-operation with the proletarian brothers in Italy, and ensuring that they would hold out…High Command had little faith in their capacity to withstand Prussia, the Cossacks, the Ottomans and the Bourbon.
However the steady offensive of the Soviet Army, which had crowned reasonable success with the capture of Paris by the 30th January, had come at the cost of a seesaw conflict in which the eastern front was barely holding against the Prussians, and the loss of Arlon and Luxembourg to the Bourbon.
The Committee of Military Subordination to the Supreme Soviet, 30th January 1936.
“Comrades!”
The room failed to quieten.
“COMRADES!”
Silence at last.
The Committee consisted of the Chief of Staff, Tom Wintringham, whose obsession with manoeuvre and swift conquest was the root cause of this meeting; the Chief of the Army, Borge Thing, whose belief in an Elastic Defence was being put into practice on the Prussian front, thus far successfully; Fokke Bosman, Chief of the Navy, was not required at this meeting as his ships had thus far seen little action so had sent an aide, and Aksel Larssen, Chief of the Air Force, was maintaining Air Superiority over Soviet territory, and so had come to the meeting intending to sleep.
There were also, of course, their respective aides and political officers, sat in the background.
“Comrades, thus far the war goes well. In conflict against the Bourbon, Sweden, and Prussia, we have lost Copenhagen, Arlon, and Luxembourg - in return we hold as far as Paris and Calais.”
“However, thus far we have made little to no progress in our original goal of linking up with Roma to bolster their defences.”
"Our gains are shown in red; our losses in green."
“Comrade Horner, the Armaments Minister, informs me we cannot expect the newly recruited divisions to be ready to deploy until the end of March, and so they won’t be able to fight on the continent until mid-April. For now, we must work with what we have. What strategy should we pursue?”
Wintringham continued “My personal belief is that we should focus on the Bourbon. If the Prussian front is quiet they can happily fight the Swedes or Cossacks, whereas if we leave the Bourbon breathing room they will be fighting Roma or the APR. We already hold Paris, and although resistance is stiffening, I believe we can be at the Pyrenees by Mayday.”
Borge then spoke up to contradict his superior, saying “On the contrary, the fact that the Prussians must focus elsewhere gives us the opportunity to overstretch them and crush them.”
For all that Thing was technically inferior to Wintringham, Borge had the ear of Saul de Groot, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (Head of State), while Wintringham had as an ally Harry Pollitt, Executive Leader of the Supreme Soviet Prime Sub-Committee (Head of Government). However, de Groot and Pollitt had long since grown tired of adjudicating between their Chief of Staff and Chief of the Army, and so had told Larssen to hold a casting vote in their disputes.
“Comrade Larssen, what think you?”
“The Bourbon. We have already split through their initial defences, we should be able to make better progress; equally in line with our strategic aim of reaching Roma, the Bourbon are the ones invading Roman territory, the Italian peninsula itself.”
Really he just wanted the main theatre to be where his aircraft were concentrated, but that was a line of reasoning that would never be spoken aloud.
Next - the results of the Bourbon First policy.