Between Axis and Comintern: Romanian Survival (During Action Report)

[Alex Kernel]

While marching to Irakleio, the Romaninan Alpine divisions were intercepted by the 5th Greek division in Rethymno. Aircraft was scrambled to bombard the enemy formations. Another two infantry divisions were preparing to land on the shores of Tympary.

4.10.1938 Battle of Rethymno

4.10.38 Forces distribution

Outnumbered, the Greek division panicked and deserted on 5th October the frontline before due reinforcements could arrive.

5.10.38 Battle results

Later that day the other two divisions tried under intense air fire in an atmosphere of chaos on 5. and 6.10.38 to take defensive positions but failed, retreating hastingly to Irakleio.

Realizing too late that another invasion force had landed in Tympaki the desperate officer corpse itself marched on the province to throw back the Romanians into the Sea, but they stood no chance, being outnumbered by 13 to one.

6.10.1938 Battle of Tympaki

The disastrous counteroffensive mounted by the Greek generals was a masterpiece of incompetence. By the 11.10.1938 all the Greek units were on the run, closely followed by the Romanian divisions on the roads to Irakleio.

11.10.38 Race to Irakleio

On the 18 October the Romanian troops entered Irakleion almost unopposed. The rebel Greek generals signed the capitulation and the next day the annexation of Greece was proclaimed.

19 October, Annexation of Greece

The Romanian Government was unsure as to what to do in Greece. No one in Bucharest wanted to keep Greece occupied, but releasing the country posed a host of problems.

Now, with the Greek army in tatters, Italy would probably be quick to attack and invade the country itself, given the inflammatory language of Mussolini and his fascist Party regarding Italian claims of hegemony in Eastern Mediterranean and of reviving the glory of ancient Rome. On the other hand, the Greek King George II, who took refuge in Bucharest before the Romanian invasion, was a too weak figure to represent any insurance for a stable Greek government and against foreign intervention.

At this point in time the Greek society was deeply fractured, with two strong far right and far right extremes vying for power. The democratic parties were unpopular also due to country’s mismanagement in the past and incapacity to defend the democratic order. Any of the two main alternatives to power in the case of Romanian retreat would almost surely draw major powers (Italy/Axis or USSR/Comintern) in Greece, to fill the power vacuum and implicitly threaten Romanian security.

The diplomatic follow-up from the Greek affair weighted heavy on the Romanian leadership. The Soviet Union almost declared war, Italy became yet again very hostile to Romania, seeing thwarted its hegemonial masterplan in Southern Europe and being rejected the claim on Crete. Germany was less interested in Greece, but is was expected to use this liability to further its interests against Romanias’. The Allies asked for the independence of Greece and building a unity government under Prime Minister Metaxas, but Romania rejected it as too risky. Romania’s foreign ties to the Allies have been since strained durably.

The aim of the Romanian administration in Athens was thus set to build a collaboration Government with moderate Greek political figures and parties, with the longer term goal to liberate the country in a more stable international configuration.

The next task of the Romanian Government was to improve the administration regime in the occupied territories, so that the revolt risks would be eliminated. It was decided to increase the creation of MP divisions, despite the downside of draining some of the the MP for the regular army units for the next year or two. The surfice needed to pacify is more then the original Romanian territory, which creates a certain vulnerability for the nation. At the end of the day a nation has to trade off some vulnerabilities for the others.

20.10.1938 Revolt risk across Romania

On the 21.10.1938 the Romanian cavalry divisions reached the Croat militias and routed them after a short-lived confrontation.

21.10.1938 Croat revolt ended

With the Greek chapter over, we will move to the Treaty of Munich, which bore huge consequences for the future of the region and of the WWII. Romania had little involvement in that episode, but its reverberations on the security architecture of Romania was immense.

 

[Alex Kernel]

The clock is ticking.

Indeed, the clock is ticking. Things are heating up in a rapid sequence beginning with the Treaty of Munich. The next Great war is round the corner and the Romanian army has a long way until being ready to face a major power.

The deployment of Military Police to Hungarian and Yugoslav territories will certainly be a worthwhile investment, especially with all those foreign agitators trying to stir up trouble. Keeping the major urban centres and strategic assets out of the hands of any such agitators is simply common sense.

This is the plan.

Re Crete: I had a very similar situation earlier in my Turkey game. Supply was a recurrent issue. In the end, I found I had to add in a direct naval landing in Irakleio to finish things off, after the units attacking from on land could not finish the job. My advice would be to have a strike force ready to go and use them once you can get your ground troops in position. Ground attack air strikes, shore bombardment too if you have any ships that can give it (also to protect the transports).

Fortunately the eggregious mistakes by the Greek command officers have forestalled such a likely scenario. Should there be future sea assignments similar to this one, I will definitely pay more attention to the supply routes issue. That was a dangerous undertaking from my side.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

And now Greece has finally fallen! I do think the plan to liberate them as a puppet state once things have settled a bit makes a lot of sense, we will still have access to their air and naval bases if needed but not bear the direct responsibility for administering and insuring the country.

Fortunately the eggregious mistakes by the Greek command officers have forestalled such a likely scenario. Should there be future sea assignments similar to this one, I will definitely pay more attention to the supply routes issue. That was a dangerous undertaking from my side.

Usually, the best tactic is to land your divisions right next to the port (which is usually defended) and then attack into the port directly, which if successful should lead to your units entering the port and receiving supply in sufficient time before they run out. Admittedly, I usually prefer a direct attack on the port just because the side attack feels a bit cheesy (and the AI can use the help of player-enforced restrictions!), but this is of course rarely the optimal approach in terms of game mechanics.

 

[roverS3]

Despite the risky initial landing point and Romania's lack of transport planes, you took Crete successfully. It was about time the Romanian-Greek war was concluded. Maybe now that the Romanian Army has shown it can pull of amphibious operations, it's time to start thinking about training some Marines, and maybe acquiring licenses for some landing craft in the future. You never know when a naval landing may come in handy...

I'm also looking forward your 'Treaty of Munich' episode.

 

[Surt]

You will have to garrison every port with some Garrison unit, doesn't have to be infantry, or risk opportunistic invasions. Adding a MP to every major factory or resource province might increase production and reduce the number of uprisings. Overproducing a few garrison/MP might not be a bad idea if you have Russian ambitions.

 

[Alex Kernel]

Merry Christmas everyone! Let the guns sleep on this holy night, and have a wonderful time with our loved ones. May Peace rule the world!

 

[stnylan]

I hope you have a fortunate and wholesome New Year.

 

[Alex Kernel]

Prelude to Munich


The two world wars originating in Europe can only be understood by observing the long breath of history. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 a.d., which had unified for almost a Millennium much of the continent, invading migratory tribes settled, mingling with the local Romanized populations. Antiquity waned with the nascent and growing nobility class all over Europe that brought new social relations, property forms and the disintegration of former tribal structures of the invading populations. The new states of the Middle Age were initially centralized groupings of territories of landowners (nobles), who served under the most successful of them, who managed to appropriate the title of King or simply became overlord. Hence the state was at its beginnings private property of militarized and landowner families, the foreign policy events were matters of family: competition for power inside royal families, between noble families to claim the royal title and its absolute privileges, internobility marriages to secure alliances and acquire new lands etc. The conflict faults were often at the nobility level, meaning the great majority of the population, around 90% of the total, was ordinarily neither involved nor afflicted by wars among the noble houses. The usual war operations involved most of the time a few thousand soldiers, with only the conflagrations between the biggest “state” units numbering 10.000 to 15.000 men per army. Wars were plenty, but not particularly destructive at the populations’ level. Serious conflicts emerged in Europe though during the late Middle Age (1200-1648) among religious rifts (Christianity – Islam, Catholics-Protestants, Catholics-Orthodox). After the first European war at continental scale, the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), that resulted in the death of 1/3 of the population in Northern Germany and parts of neighboring countries, immense material destruction and the bankruptcy of all the major European powers, the epoch of religious strife came to a screeching halt, ensuing at the same time a centuries old process of state institutionalization that changed forever the concept of state.

Up until the French Revolution in 1789 and Napoleon’s hegemonial gamble, ethnicity and language did not play a primary role in the defining of states and their borders. The French Revolution spread the idea of national identity with states along ethnic lines across Europe (and beyond), an unintended consequence of France’s short lived Napoleonic expansionistic drive. Up to the WWI, the most European states were multinational empires, states and kingdoms with mixed ethnicities derived from the structure of the medieval political system. One can imagine what an explosive political nightmare the ideas of national self-determination and liberal democracy was in the XIX-nth century for the shaking order based on the decaying class of nobility, whose role declined with the speed of commercial (XVIth century) and industrial (XIXth century) revolutions. In my view, the First World War was a product of mismanaged Great Power competition on an explosive ideological background of awakened/created national identity strongly linked to the unrealistic principle of ethnic homogeneity, and of profound social changes over the previous century. Only a seismic shift in social and cultural structures combined with the forces unleashed by the industrial revolution can explain how interstate war (WWI) came to set tens of millions of people, i.e. entire societies and their resources, against each other – light years away from the pity nobility squabbles of the past age. What a tremendous force nationalism was to make people feel they have a life and death stake in the conflict above their heads and to motivate them to sustain horrendous battles where quasi-infinite numbers of fellow citizens lost their lives killing other citizens… One may barely fathom the absurdity of such a bloody history led by fundamentalist ideology.

The year 1918 marking the pyrrhic Allied victory over the Central Powers came with the responsibility to redraw the borders of Eastern Europe - which for many centuries was ruled by oppressive authoritarian multinational empires - according to the principles of self-determination along ethnic majorities. And so, new states emerged (e.g. Poland, the Baltic States, Albania), while others grew in accordance to their natural ethnic borders (e.g. Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia) on the ruins of former Medieval empires – Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. To a large degree the principle of self-determination was applied satisfactorily in Eastern Europe, making justice to many regional nations but serious problems arose in the same package with the Wilsonian solution.

Drawing hard borders along ethnic majorities was an impossible mission in many regions of Eastern Europe, because for so many centuries during the middle age nobody cared about ethnicity and language as foundations of community identity, and people from various ethnic groups mingled in cities and villages creating multiethnic regions at the margins of more homogenous ethnic groups. This fact led to territorial border tensions among all the states in Eastern Europe, no matter how precise and well intended the Great Powers in Versailles in their border reconfiguration arbitration were.

Nobody in the region got all the territories it coveted, but it is largely accurate to say, the countries who felt the Treaty of Versailles arbitration was mostly satisfying key historical claims did strive to upheld the new world order and the security arrangements coming with it, while the ones who lost many territories actively sought to undermine this order and profit from any opportunity like a new world war or the defeat of the guaranteeing great powers.

The proponents of the Versailles status quo were Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and a shaky Yugoslavia, while the Great Powers guaranteeing the order were the Allies, except the United States, who, swept by isolationism, retreated from the European (and world) affairs.

The opponents of Versailles, also called revisionist powers, were in Eastern Europe Hungary, Bulgaria, and nationalist-fascist movements in Yugoslavia, and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. Among the Great powers Germany acted from the beginning against Versailles, because that treaty forced the country to cede 13% of its territory, mostly along the Eastern borders. To be fair, many of these lost territories were inhabited by German majorities, while in the rest there was a significant German minority. At the same time, several parts ceded to Poland were parts of the Polish kingdom until XVIII-nth century (when the country disappeared after three painful partitions between the neighbouring imperial powers: The Tsarist Russia, the Austrian Empire and Prussia), and were inhabited by Polish majorities. As I said, border disputes were (and still are) are very messy issues. Versailles also forced Berlin to outrageously high war reparations, increasing the German general sentiments of historical injustice, and motivation to work against it long before the Nazis came to power in 1933. Add the Great Depression to this mix and you get the perfect ingredients for the success of the xenophobic, populist and expansionistic discourse of the fascist forces. Italy and the Soviet Union were lukewarm to Versailles arrangement for a variety of reasons, but turned resolutely revisionist in the last years of interbellum peace. Italy was firmly in the Allies camp during the First World War, but its territorial claims once the conflict ended, were to a degree not satisfied, which created resentment in Rome. Mussolini’s fascists who took power as early as 1925, sought ever since in a very opportunistic manner to choose the alliance system ready to acquiescence to their territorial demands against Austria, Yugoslavia, and in Africa. The Soviet Union has secretly cooperated for a over decade from early 1920s to early 1930s with Germany to modernize their militaries, despite heavy interdictions on German rearmament, because it wanted (1) to reconstitute its Western borders the Imperial Russia had in Eastern Europe before the WWI, it hoped (2) to crush the liberal-democratic and capitalist world order with German hands (destroying them too shortly after) , and (3) to expand as much as possible territorially in Western Europe, while exporting the Socialist Revolution in the rest of the world.

The difficulty for the Soviets was that all the territories the Russian Empire had conquered during the XVIII-nth and XIX-nth century in Eastern Europe were inhabited by non-Russian populations with long state and strong political-identity history, who staunchly opposed Russian domination all the time. Now these populations were living within the national states of their choice, respectively the Baltics, Poland, and Romania, very suspicious of both Russian expansionism and the communist ideology, which they saw as pretext for renewed Russian expansionism. The Soviet Union was weary of provoking the Allies to a war it could not win alone, thus not daring to attack Poland and Romania protected by and allied with France, but felt uneasy to join an alliance with the revanchist Germany, which could threaten again the security of Russia itself. Since such a dilemma was hard to crack, Russia tended to undermine Versailles, reverting to a lukewarm support whenever it feared more the German wild card.

In this historical context one can grasp the complex Czechoslovak border issue, a tragic herald of the WWII.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Nice to see this one back! It's been a bit quiet around here, and having Lord El Pip as one of the most frequent updaters has been harrowing to say the least...

The two world wars originating in Europe can only be understood by observing the long breath of history. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 a. d.,

Oh boy, when you said "long" you weren't kidding.

So now we're moving onwards along the path to war. How will Romania feel about this continued German aggression? One might hope they along with France would guarantee Czech independence to contain the German menace, but alas I suspect this is unlikely to be the case..

 

[roverS3]

With HOI3 starting in 1936 it's not often we see history going back to Roman times on this subforum. That said. You've beautifully framed the context and the very evolution of statehood in Europe, as well as it's implications on identity, borders, and warfare. This makes me even more excited for part 2, the actual Munich summit.

Glad to have you back.

 

[Bullfilter]

Great ‘pocket analysis’ of the geopolitical underpinnings leading to 20th C Versailles. Anglo-educated people (of which I am one) tend to consider Napoleon and his legacy in an entirely different light to many in Europe. The view of him can range from a kind of imperialistic proto-Hitler trying to conquer everything he could, to someone seen as a modern liberator of oppressed societies from entrenched imperial domination of the existing powers. (Something my father observed, from an early education in Poland and France, before finishing high school in Australia.)

If you put the Seven Years War aside, I think it is possible to see the period of the Napoleonic Wars as WW1 of the ‘modern’ nationalistic era, followed by an unnaturally long period of suppressed global war (sure, some fair sized civil, interstate and national creation wars in between). Then a century later, things go mad again and you get WW2 (Parts 1 and 2) between 1914-45.

Not saying this is accepted interpretation or even necessarily right, but it is one way of looking at things that can be entertaining and I think would sit well enough within your excellent wider analysis provided above.

It's been a bit quiet around here, and having Lord El Pip as one of the most frequent updaters has been harrowing to say the least...

A disturbing thought on many levels.

 

[Alex Kernel]

Thanks everyone for your kind support. To be sincere, I was taken aback by the work involved to make these historical descriptions. In the end I had to come to terms with the fact that this scenario will move very slow in game terms in order to keep the story going in the spirit it began with. Hopefully it won’t be "slower than real life" though .

Anglo-educated people (of which I am one) tend to consider Napoleon and his legacy in an entirely different light to many in Europe. The view of him can range from a kind of imperialistic proto-Hitler trying to conquer everything he could, to someone seen as a modern liberator of oppressed societies from entrenched imperial domination of the existing powers. (Something my father observed, from an early education in Poland and France, before finishing high school in Australia.)

If you put the Seven Years War aside, I think it is possible to see the period of the Napoleonic Wars as WW1 of the ‘modern’ nationalistic era, followed by an unnaturally long period of suppressed global war (sure, some fair sized civil, interstate and national creation wars in between). Then a century later, things go mad again and you get WW2 (Parts 1 and 2) between 1914-45.

Regarding Napoleon, his description as proto-Hitler in the Anglo-Saxon space is misplaced. First of all Hitler and Stalin were war criminals guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other horrifying war crimes. Napoleon didn’t display such an extreme deviant behavior.

True they all fought for absolute power, but this is not new in the international states system(s): Ancient empires like Persia, Rome and China tried to acquire hegemonial power in their international (regional) political systems, and so competed for hegemony in their state system France, Great Britain, Spain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire before Napoleon. Therefore, Napoleon did nothing new, only he was one of the most efficient in defeating competition in the millennial fight for power in Europe.

He was a man of his time, a child of the French Revolution, and as such he did in his quest for power use the revolutionary nationalism ideology capable to galvanize the entire French society for his (not so original) imperial project. And, while expanding his empire towards the East, he introduced social reforms, modernized Roman law, and unwittingly spread new ideas like the (modern) republic form of government (questioning the doctrine of the divine right of rule by Kings and Emperors), national identity and national state based on ethnicity and language.

All these reforms have shaken to the core the multinational empires in Eastern Europe, and ideologically strengthened the case of their illegitimate rule over foreign territories. I believe that the winning coalition of the old monarchies had good reason to loath Napoleon and portraitize him as a mad man obsessed with power. Napoleonic France has almost toppled the ruling houses of Europe (interlinked by matrimonial alliances) and threatened the British colonial Empire. So, no wonder Napoleon stayed in the Anglo-Saxon history books as the British saw him.

Whereby in Western Europe his reign has almost destroyed well established states like Spain, Austria and Prussia, in Eastern Europe, he definitely changed the elite and popular mentality, setting the path for liberation movements for the next century.

On the other hand, his quest for imperial power has deeply compromised the republic, contradicting its tenets, and corrupting its ideals. Absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton), and thus, ironically, the French republic degenerated into imperialism, the very ideology it was supposed to combat.

One more thing. "The ‘modern’ nationalistic era" has reformed in positive terms many aspects of all European societies (like the idea of citizenry and citizen rights, equality of rights and infront of law, constitutional democracy, representative government, and so on). Nonetheless it also caused one of the bloodiest episodes in human history. Generally, progress is a two sided coin: it entails the promise of a way better world, and the risk of unimaginable destruction. It is up to us how things turn out, because the choice is ours alone.

 

[Bullfilter]

Agreed. I’m a bit of a Napoleon fan-boy myself.

 

[Alex Kernel]

Prelude to Munich (II)

Czechoslovakia was a classical example of unresolved messy territorial issues in Versailles, with heavily mingled ethnicity, and untenable historical borders (in this era of Nationalism, not ended yet in our own contemporaneity), resulted from Medieval politics.

Celtic tribes settled in the Czechoslovak region centuries BC. After the 2nd century AD, the Germanic tribe of Marcomanni came to dominate the core of the region, building important cities like today's Brno. Between 375 and the 7th century a massive Migration Period occurred in Eastern, Central and Western Europe, which displaced the Germanic tribes to the West under the Hunic, and later Slavic invasions.

The Eastern Roman Empire in the South, and the Western Roman Empire together with Germanic allies managed in extremis to repel the Hunic threat toward the end of the 4th century, but numerous Slavic tribes successfully invaded and settled in during the 7th century: Poland, Czechia, Pannonia (today Hungary), and the Balkans (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kossovo, Bulgaria and North Macedonia). A new invasion in the 10th century by Hungarians south of Czechoslovakia led to their settlement in the Pannonian plains roughly between Tisza and the contemporary border with Austria.

So, a predominantly western Slavic population created the Czech Kingdom of Bohemia, which is the central province of later Czechoslovakia and of the present Czech Republic. During the Xth century Bohemia became part of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) comprising mostly German states, including Austria.

Later in the High Middle Ages Germans settled back into the less populated Bohemian border regions.

Stages of German eastern settlement, 700-1400

From as early as the second half of the 13th century onwards these Bohemian border regions were settled by ethnic Germans, who were invited by the Přemyslid Bohemian kings — especially by Ottokar II (1253–1278) and Wenceslaus II (1278–1305) following the devastations caused by brief Mongol Invasion of 1241. The Germans populated towns and mining districts on the Bohemian periphery and in some cases formed German colonies in the interior of the Czech lands. The Germans brought their own code of law – the ius teutonicum – which formed the basis of the later commercial law of Bohemia and Moravia. Marriages between Czech nobles and Germans soon became commonplace. The Bohemian King Charles IV, was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, opening a string of Slavic Czech Emperors of the HRE. Also, Prague was for a time the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. In the hilly border regions - called Sudetenland in the XX-th Century - German settlers established major manufactures of forest glass, becoming major economic centres of Bohemia. The Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, great regional powers at the time, vied for power with the HRE to annex Bohemia during the XV-th and the XVIth centuries. However, an unexpected event has changed once again the course of history.

The Ottoman Empire, having defeated definitively the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453 was hoping to conquer the Western Christian Europe, and the millennial symbol of its greatness, the eternal city of Rome. In the Battle of Mohács in 1526 King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia was killed and Hungary was obliterated by the Turks.

Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria marched quickly into Bohemia and other western regions of former Hungary, probably to create a buffer zone against the Ottoman threat. He became the new King of Bohemia and the country became a constituent state of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the east, the surviving ruling predominant Hungarian nobility proclaimed the Romanian majority Transylvania as a vassal state to Ottomans to prevent occupation.

In 1529 the Ottomans renewed their campaign sieging Vienna itself, the gate to Italy and Western Europe. The Habsburg-Austrians aided by German mercenaries and Spanish troops were poised to defend the city at all costs. Dramatic scenes played out in that titanic confrontation ending with a Turkish defeat and sealing the future of Bohemia as Austrian province for many centuries to come.

There are two points of this excursus into history. First, Bohemia and Moravia/largely Czechia, have a rich history of cultural blending into the Germanic world, and those who visit Prague can see in the city’s architecture and art the massive Germanic influence. The region was a melting pot for the two ethnicities, who lived in peace for seven centuries during the Middle Ages. Both the Germans and Slavic Czechs profited in economic, cultural and political terms from their reciprocal integration, that is, until nationalism had undone the old medieval order and imposed new (divisive) ideological canons.

Secondly, in view of this past where Germans and Slavs lived together and ruled in turns over Bohemia and Moravia, German territorial claims were not entirely baseless. Often Great Powers in International Politics do move in a morally grey area, instead of the black and white abstract constructs we are so comfortable with. Nonetheless, one should avoid to relativize the good and bad of the major players of the time to a munchy indistinguishable soup. The Nazi and Soviet regimes were deeply criminal in nature, committing heinous crimes against humanity (genocides, ethnic cleansing, widespread torture, and mass executions, forced labour, provoked famines, mass deportation with staggering death rates imposed by state policy on the basis of ethnicity, and labour transfer and organised Russian migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories, etc.), war crimes, violating international law in the most cynical and brazen ways possible, and trampling shamelessly free nations under their feet.

Coming back to the 1930s, let’s see the ethnic and historical provinces’ composition of Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovak provinces 1930s

Linguistic map of interwar Czechoslovakia (c. 1930).

Ethnic distribution in Austria-Hungary in 1911: regions with a German majority are depicted in pink, those with Czech majorities in blue.

Central Europe by spoken languages 1937

(This last map of Central Europe by language/ethnicity reveals the political fractures amongst states emerging at the borders: Czechoslovakia had to contend with territorial claims not only from Germany/Austria, but also from Hungary and Poland, whereby Poland was formally its ally in the French "Cordon Sanitaire". Also Germany claimed from Poland the Danzig region linking Germany proper to East Prussia, and Hungary claimed Transylvania from Romania despite the Hungarians being there a cut off minority, and territories from Yugoslavia. Many other border issues existed along almost all national boders in Southern and Eastern Europe.)

 

[Bullfilter]

Welcome back! An interesting excursion into the lead up to the period.

 

[stnylan]

I do believe the technical term is indeed that it is a mess.

 

[roverS3]

Loving the in depth European background. Don't worry too much about how quickly things are moving along. This in-depth historical and political storytelling is something you do well, and something you seem to like doing. Even if the game slows down to a crawl, I'll be reading along, if only because it also gives me your take on European history, which I find fascinating in itself. Keep it up.

While it isn't relevant to this AAR. I am curious as to why, in that language map, Walloon and French are considered separate languages and Flemish and Dutch are considered the same, whilst the respective differences between Walloon and French, and those between Flemish and Dutch (especially back in the 1930's) seem to me to have been of a similar magnitude, as they had trouble understanding each-other when first encountering the other variant, but it was close enough for them to catch up quickly. I have anecdotal evidence to back that up from both sides of the 'language border'... Of course, I'm no linguist, so I might be wrong.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Even if the game slows down to a crawl, I'll be reading along, if only because it also gives me your take on European history, which I find fascinating in itself. Keep it up.

Also, even if the game slows down to a crawl, it will still substantially outpace anything Lord El Pip has ever written, and he does alright for himself somehow.

 

[Surt]

This is not going to end well for the Czechoslovakians ...