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But Estonia actually exists and not as a soviet republic?
For now???
Yes, I actually pointed this out some time back. This timeline is actually quite disturbing in some ways...
Well, between him and Adenauer, I know which one I prefer.
Hrmm. Memel is actually an interesting question which will have to come up at some point.
Karelian said:
And @ Arilou: What's really disturbing, if you think about it, is that nobody is really talking about making some changes to make the Republic more democratic. Germany still has a state-owned and managed radio and television station; there is still a vigorous youth movement; and the president still has the power to rule by decree.
This is probably okay under Stresemann and Schumacher. But I leave it to the reader to imagine, say, 8 years of Bush with that kind of power.
It's weird, but I can easily imagine something like a Nazi counterculture in Germany develpoing in the 60s. Most optimistically, to borrow from a friend:
Carlton_bach said:
More pessimistically, well, I think the readers all know what happens when you get Neonazis with Nukes.
Thrilling update, you should seek employment as a speech writer.
I am most thrilled to see the SPD in power and it is almost nicer to know that this time, Schumacher came out on top instead of Adenauer.
The situation in France, however, seems dark, tense and incredibly chaotic. I take it that Reynaud means Paul Reynaud? If so let's hope that he manages to team up with de Gaulle in order to bring France out of its humiliated series of defeats to the Japanese.
I am most thrilled to see the SPD in power and it is almost nicer to know that this time, Schumacher came out on top instead of Adenauer.
The situation in France, however, seems dark, tense and incredibly chaotic. I take it that Reynaud means Paul Reynaud? If so let's hope that he manages to team up with de Gaulle in order to bring France out of its humiliated series of defeats to the Japanese.
Or worse...8 years of Barak Obama cowtowing to 'President' Nancy Pelosi...
TheExecuter
Or worse...8 years of Barak Obama cowtowing to 'President' Nancy Pelosi...
Unless, of course, the G.O.P. gets their act together. But that's another story for another day.
Or worse...8 years of Barak Obama cowtowing to 'President' Nancy Pelosi...
Since you're talking to someone who thinks the main problem with Obama thus far is that he's been too centrist, this may not be persuasive.
But not to get off topic, I do think the way Obama went from "concern about the untrammeled power of the executive" to "Mine! Mine! Mine!" is a bit dissapointing.
Anyway, I seem to remember that the AAR actually has a war going on somewhere, and I feel like I should probably get back to it, and the Hong Kong Uprising.
Milites said:
I can't take the credit, alas. It's an amalgam of two speeches, one from 2008 and one from 1945. First one to guess whose speeches they were gets. Umm. Self-satisfaction? Cameo?
We'll see. Or perhaps La Rocque wins a second term?
I didn't mean to make France seem chaotic, actually, although it should be a little dark. The thing is that France is more stable than it's been in a very long time, with real and significant reforms for, IMO, the better. Regionalism is something France struggled with until far later than the 1940s, and women didn't get the vote until Liberation in OTL. But at the same time, even if La Rocque likes to present himself off as a moderate, he has no problem using violence in the political process when he feels the need.
I haven't been able to find much of anything about De Gaulle's political views in the 30s, BTW, but given his postwar politics I imagine he's a PSF member.
There was something I read about de Gaulle attending at least one PSF meeting before WW2, but it's not clear whether it's a fact or an attempt to link him with de La Roque (who is still largely considered as a crypto-Fascist in most textbooks, even though modern Historians now refute that thesis). de Gaulle seems to have come to politics as a way to advance his military agenda. A France embracing the idea of mechanized war in 1938 (and managing to fend off the german Blitzkrieg) might never had seen de Gaulle rising as a statesman., and the Grand Charles would probably have been a minor figure in French History.
Given the fact de Gaulle's OTL reforms were very close to what de La Roque had in mind in 1938, I think it's a good bet. Either that or he'll stick with Reynaud's Alliance Démocratique, since the two of them seemed to have a real connection.
Funny thing, de La Roque wanted to form regional entities to administrate France, so everything would not come from Paris.
I still find it funny to compare that situation ot OTL postwar Finland - exluding the the youth movement all those elements mentioned above were present. My point is that such a situation is bound to create sharp division within the society: the supporters of status quo versus the reform-minded minority. And since it seems that all politicians are happily maintaining their current powers (no surprises here), the disaffected voters will either become passive or turn increasingly radical.
So, how many seats did the communists and far-right groups get in the last parliamentary elections?
Yes, and the Soviet envisaged a fraternal association of Soviets. For some reason, once people gain the ability to rule with the power that comes with the government of a tightly centralized state, they are much less inclined to favor local autonomy, even if they campaigned on such. So I was inclined towards thinking La Rocque wouldn't actively push it.
Hrmm. Although I get the impression that if France did push for something along those lines (greater autonomy for each department, I guess?) It would be a much more conservative country. Thoughts?
Karelian said:
I think the far right got around 9%; of course, since the electoral system requires 5% of the popular vote to gain a seat, and there are several different far right parties, none of them are represented in the Reichstag.
The Communists are, hrmm, an interesting question. It seems to me that even at the height of the Depression, in 1932, they only snagged around 16% of the vote. If you go back to 1928, they were getting around 10% of the vote. After the invasion of Finland, I would imagine that KPD votes hovers around 11-13%, with dislike of some aspects of Stalinist Russia balanced against the Social Democrats rightward drift.
De La Roque had something in mind in 1938, but whether he'd have chosen (or been able) to force the issue remains to be seen indeed. The question of local administrative autonomy has always been tricky - after all, even de Gaulle failed to reform that part of the French institutions in 1969, his one and only electoral defeat in a referendum.
And well, autonomy isn't independence. Even in today's France local governments, whose "free administration" is guaranteed by the Constitution, operate under the watchful eye of the State for what pertains to the legality of the local decisions - the focus of State control has shifted from the core of the issue to a more technical question of legality.
Départements are too small - the right idea would be to push for what in OTL has become the Regions. They're loosely based on WW1's "production regions". In WW1 A Minister named Etienne Clémentel realized that the French economy didn't operate on the kind of rational terms associated with war production, and so he identified a number of areas within which, because of cultural/economical reasons, war production should be reorganized. When in the 1970s the French government decided it was time to organize some sort of local seats of power, the "Clémentel Regions" served as a blueprint. He died in 1936, but his ideas are bound to be alive in the minds of the industrialists and civil servants who worked with him...
Objects in Motion
Under the banner of the Rising Sun, Hong Kong suffered. It was not just the hunger, reducing people to eating rice husks. It was not just that the Japanese had expelled hundreds of thousands from the city, and turned the Diocesan Boys' School into an execution ground. No, thought Lee Hsien Loong, it was the way the Japanese walked the streets of the city. They sauntered around as if they had built this city, changing the names of streets and buildings to their language.
He stepped through a broken wooden door into a tavern that looked like it had been built in the Tang dynasty and gone downhill since then. He looked around, and sat at a table. When a waitress walked up, wearing a plain dress. Lee frowned; it was like the qipao her mother wore, when no Englishmen were present, but of a much more revealing cut. “Rice wine, please, and a bowl of noodles.” When the waitress didn’t move, he pulled out some Japanese yen and passed them to her awkwardly. “Keep the change, please.”
The waitress narrowed her eyes, but walked off, leaving him to look around the tavern. Lee looked around, noticing that some people were casting glances in his direction. He wasn’t fat, but he felt distinctly well-fed compared to some of the people around him. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as he noticed the looks from people in the restaurant, and realized that generosity with Japanese currency to a serving girl may give the wrong impression.
Still, he had a job to do. When the waitress returned, he asked, as she put the noodles down, “What do you think of Song Jiang?”
The waitress frowned. “Just another outlaw of the water margin, who came to a bad end thanks to an unjust King-Emperor.” She hesitated for a second, and picked the noodles up.
He took a sip of his rice wine, feeling his stomach knot. “The Song were by no means, perfect, but weren’t they better than the Mongols?”
“A man who’s proud to be better than the Mongols is not much of a man at all.” She frowned. “Let me bring you another bowl.”
After he finished a different bowl of noodles, the serving girl returned again. “Would you like to join me,” she said in a low voice, “for a second helping?”
It was the sort of establishment where nobody noticed a serving girl going upstairs with a man, even if the man spoke with an accent that even Hong Kong found weird. When she opened the door to a room, there was a man sitting on the floor, sipping a cup of hot water. “I hope you don’t mind if I watch,” he said. “The English never paid me enough to afford a go of my own.”
The serving girl frowned. “And so the stories the Communists spin of a better future for China’s women?”
The man bowed his head in humility. “I recognize I have my sins. I hope that when Communism abolishes money, it will also abolish my need to pay for a good time.”
Lee looked at the two of them. “But how can you have need of such a lovely woman, when Communism preaches that to each according to his abilities?”
The man did a good job trying to scowl before bursting out laughing. “Okay, so the boy from Nanyang can make a joke. What else can he do?”
Lee cleared his throat. “His Majesty’s Government asks for your help.” He paused. “The League of Nations armies are approaching Guangzhou from the West, with the Royal Navy advancing up the coast. But taking Hong Kong itself back, unaided, would be a disaster.”
The shifted on his haunches. “Ah, so the British want some coolies to die first, and conveniently kill off any partisans who have learned how to resist an imperialist oppressor?”
Lee frowned, thinking back to some of the speakers he’d heard when he’d gone to college in England. “That’s not fair.”
The man shrugged. “You seem like a good enough man, for a boy who wants to be English. But look around you. There are parks where you, with your English accent, wouldn’t be allowed in. This city was built by the masses of China, but when was the last time the English ever let us vote?”
Lee sighed. “You’re right. Whereas the British respond to strikes with the iron rod of negotiation and tolerance, the enlightened rule of the Generalissimo sees any worker who gets uppity shot, and any worker who doesn’t get uppity shot just to be on the safe side. Or, of course, you could join the Communists, who will only shoot you if you’re an uppity landowner.”
“Guan Yin preserve us,” said the man. “Your parents want you to be a politician, don’t they?” He grunted, his voice hardening. “You know, it’s a nice line. The problem is that you haven’t been in Hong Kong for the past year. You haven’t seen the Japanese behead a rickshaw driver because he didn’t bow fast enough, or a girl get raped in her home because some soldiers got frisky. You haven’t seen a grandmother whore herself on the street to get some food for her orphaned grandchildren, because the fucking British didn’t trust us enough.”
Lee spread his hands, thinking. What would Singapore have been like, occupied by a foreign enemy? Or London? “I’m sorry, and His Majesty’s Government is sorry.” He swallowed. “I do think that the British will try to make it right, when this is over. But how this ends is up to us.”
_____________________________________________
The fundamental problem with an assault on Hong Kong was that the territory was supremely defensible. While the Entente had air superiority, the Japanese had dug in along the Shenzen River, and had the option of withdrawing to Hong Kong Island itself. Its harbor was already useless to Japan, and its reservoirs could be destroyed to render the position indefensible, but that would simply cause the lost of hundreds of thousands of lives as the Japanese would ration the remaining water for themselves. This was, in a word, unacceptable.
As a result, the British began to consider other options, notably local guerilla forces. The fall of Hong Kong had only increased the strength of local Chinese resistance groups, notably the First Independent Group of the of the East River Column under Zheng Sheng. Although their size is still debated, the consensus of historians is that they had approximately two thousand members with rifles and machine guns, with many more sympathizers. Contacts with the Entente Army had let them smuggle more weapons across the porous front lines of China into the city, helping to lead to the Hong Kong Uprising in August of 1943.
_____________________________________________
General Sakai listened to the thunder in the distance on a fine summer’s evening. If he was back in Hiroshima, it might have been a sign of a thunder storm, come to bring a refreshing burst of rain. Here, it was a sign the British were getting closer. He looked over the battle plans. “Kobayashi ,” he called, “Why is the 230th Regiment still on the Island?”
A haggard looking man came into the office. “General Sakai, sir, there has been a delay transporting them to the mainland. Given the English attacks on our shipping, I thought it prudent to wait until nightfall.”
Sakai sighed. “Come with me for a moment, Kobayashi.” He walked to the window, opening to reveal the harbor spread out before them. “The Honorable Kobayashi must be wiser than I, to know why those ships,” he pointed, “will not suffice.”
Kobayashi kept his eyes focused on the floor. “Forgive me, General Sakai. I just thought-“
“What an accomplishment. You should try it more often.” He thought for a moment. “Dispatch the orders, and then report here.”
Kobayashi kept his eyes towards the ground. “Yes sir. I will call immediately.”
Sakai nodded. “After you’ve called, be sure to hand deliver the message. We can’t be too careful.” He paused. “Oh, and take a bike.”
“Sir?”
Sakai had already returned to his desk. “Gasoline is rare.”
After a couple of hours, Sakai noted with satisfaction that the ferries had moved into the channel and begun crossing the river. He noted with less satisfaction the drone that could be heard shortly thereafter, and the planes that appeared in the sky.
When Kobayashi returned to the office an hour later, he kept his eyes on the ground to avoid Sakai’s face. “General Sakai, sir, I delivered the orders, as per your requested. Unfortunately, it appears that the Englishmay have indefinitely delayed the men's arrival.”
General Sakai scowled. “Do you have any idea on casualties?”
“Of the five hundred and fifty four men who were being rushed over, at least two hundred have given their lives in defense of the Emperor while loaded down with equipment on a barge.” He paused. “Should we send the rest of the men, General?”
_____________________________________________
When the assault on Hong Kong took place, it involved a two prong assault. A significant force attacked from Shenzen, rapidly breaking through Japanese lines and sweeping aside Japanese defenses. While the Cromwell and Mathilda tanks were inferior to French or German armored units, compared to what the Japanese had they were Loki on wheels, backed up by an astonishing concentration of artillery and air support. The battle for Hong Kong was still among the bloodiest of the war, and it took seven days from the crossing of the Shenzhen to reach Kowloon. But the British had delayed the advance for two reasons. They had hoped to encourage the Japanese to funnel forces into the conflict on land, and equally importantly, they had a significant number of forces deployed elsewhere.
In any event, the key was the island of Hong Kong, where eleven thousand Japanese soldiers had holed up. On September 3rd the British had begun a full-scale bombardment of the island they hoped to liberate, using a combination of warships parked off of the city and aerial bombardment from airfields outside Guangzhou. When the landings went forward three days, it was into a cauldron of fire that had been a major city. Yet simultaneous with the landings, the First Independent Group of the of the East River Column rose up within the city, even as the majority of Japanese forces were deployed to the British landing points. And whereas the Japanese were spread across the island, the East River Column had one goal: The Japanese command post at the Parker Hotel.
_____________________________________________
The rattle of gunfire and the smell of smoke swirled together around Sakai. The British were landing on the outskirts of the city, but his men could at least make them pay a heavy price. He picked up the bottle of sake, and threw it against the wall. “Kobayashi, do we have any more sake?” Then he remembered where he was. “Or is there any scotch left in the bar downstairs!”
Kobayashi came running through the door, a rifle in his hand. “General Sakai, we have a problem.”
“I know we do,” he slurred. “we’re out of sake.”
The rattle of gunfire was overtaken by a louder noise, as a series of machine guns opened up from the buildings around the Hotel. Kobayashi, to his credit, remained standing, while Sakai was too drunk to get up. “General, that is the problem.”
“Well, what are you standing here for then? Go deal with it.”
Kobayashi hesitated. “Should I call some men back from the beach front?”
“What, are you deaf? I told you to deal with it.”
Kobayashi was silent for a moment, and saluted. “Yes sir.”
Sakai sighed when Kobayashi left the room. “I should’ve had him bring me something to drink first.” He looked around his office, his eyes glancing briefly to a picture of his family. Well, there were some things that a man had to do.
He picked up his sword, holding it carefully in his hands. He hadn’t used this thing in years, and hadn’t trained with it since officer’s school. But what else was there? He held the blade in his hand, and propped it in a left to right position.
Unfortunately, the sword given to officers in the Imperial Japanese Army is not the best way to commit seppuku, and the procedure itself is delicate and requires a great deal of skill and finesse. And so he was still bleeding to death messily in a penthouse of the Parker Hotel as soldiers of the East River Column stormed into his office.
Consider that under Sakai’s rule, some three hundred corpses were collected from the street every day. Consider that the Kempeitai had instituted a reign of terror, slaughtering the city's people without rhyme or reason. Consider that he had condoned the casual bayoneting of Chinese civilians for military training, and condoned the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of civilians who were the friends and family of the soldiers who came into the office, where the man who had made their lives a nightmare was bleeding to death in a drunken stupor. Considering this, let us avert our eyes to something a bit more pleasant, Operation Hongwu.
Ceremony honoring those who lost their lives during the Japanese occupation
_____________________________________________
Even as the Pacific War continued, tensions between the alliance members soon intensified. Chiang Kai-shek saw the war as a chance to “see freedom restored to the small and weak nations of Asia and around the world.” While the war against Japan was important, Chiang, in his book China’s Destiny, declared that China had been a leader of Asia for thousands of years. Holding that there was “no historical evidence of exploitation or of political domination of the peoples of Asia when China was strong and prosperous,” he compared it to the Europeans, and held that “the end of the Pacific War must also mark the end of the imperialism. If China cannot be free and independent, then world peace cannot have a solid foundation.” Hence Chiang’s visit to India in February of 1942, where he called for immediate independence, was greeted, to put it mildly, with disfavor by the British. China’s intrigues to gain control of Tibet, which Britain viewed as an independent nation, and its efforts to reclaim Kowloon and Hong Kong, the bitter legacy of the 19th century’s Treaties of Humiliation.
China’s grand rhetoric and demands to be considered in discussions around the postwar fate of Indochina and Malaysia simply didn’t square, in the eyes of Britain, with China’s actual standing as a power. The British saw that during the conquest of Indochina, the China front remained peculiarly quiet, and Britain, quite frankly, had not joined the war to risk British lives for Beijing. More to the point, Chiang had no problem waging a war against the Communists, so how was he in any position to criticize Britain for its delayed withdrawal from India? And frankly, as the Economist pointed out, China was not a Great Power by any stretch of the imagination.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in a look at its military. The Guomindang army numbered around three and a half million men, but it was an unwieldy, heterogenous bunch differing in degrees of loyalty, training, and equipment. The core of the Chinese forces was the Central Army, under Chiang’s direct control, but the various warlords still commanded vast forces of their own, from Yan Xishan in the north to the Guangxi Clique in the south. The continued presence of the warlord armies hindered Chinese cooperation, and indeed in 1941 and 1942 several hundred thousand troops defected to the Japanese, along with their warlord commanders.
The plight of soldiers in the Chinese army was little better. Although in 1937 China had been on its way to developing a professional, German-trained officer corps, the first year of the war had devastated China’s military to the point where less than half of its junior officers had any actual training. Its conscripts were often peasants seized from the fields, who were then bound together with ropes around their necks to “training.” With a casualty rate that approached 20% before they even reached combat, it’s little wonder that desertion was high. In short, it pretty much sucked, and as Entente reporters descended on the wartime capital at Chongqing, more than a few wondered where the valiant soldiers that their press had told them of had gone.
Indeed, once the first British advisors arrived in Chongqing, the situation soon became tense. And when Bernard Montgomery was dispatched to Chongqing to oversee the “League of Nations Expeditionary Force,” oh boy. The resulting discussions between Chiang and Montgomery would have been mistaken, by observers in near earth orbit, for the planet's first nuclear detonation.
Montgomery’s plans for China were quite simple, calling for the reform and reorganization of the Chinese army, equipping a new and improved military force with British equipment, and backed up by British airpower and limited military forces.
Chiang Kai-shek was not a fan of this proposal, having no desire to see the military force he’d built up replaced with one less loyal to him, even if more competent. Still, given Montgomery’s threats that Britain would walk away from the war and leave Japan in control of Manchuria and Northern China if he didn’t start pulling his weight, with the Entente successes in the China Sea, there was, frankly, little choice. The British efforts to reestablish a more professional Chinese army would prove to be vastly more complex than they envisioned, and only twenty divisions would be equipped and reformed to anything approaching British levels by Operation Hongwu, but that would be sufficient for the charnel house that would be unleashed.
Operation Hongwu, named after the first Ming emperor, was, quite simply, a two-pronged assault to liberate the Chinese heartland and secure the Yangzi Delta. The culmination of a year and a half of training, reforming, and reequipping the KMT military, the establishment of Entente air superiority, and the costly Allied victories in the South China Sea, it envisioned using the KMT divisions as a hammer, which would push downriver while the more mobile Entente forces pushed up the coast, supported by aerial support and the Royal Navy.
Operation Hongwu was somewhat divisive, within the Entente High Command. More a few people questioned the wisdom of Britain dying for China proper, and advocated a continued slow strangulation of the Japanese. With the liberation of China’s major southern ports, an endless slow of supplies and naval blockade assured victory; so why pursue it with British lives?
First, quite simply, any efforts to induce Japan to come to terms had failed. Japanese responses to American peace proposals were frankly unrealistic, advocating recognition of the independence of Indochina, Manchukuo, the Philippines, and China; an international agreement to liberalize tariffs, restoring Japanese access to raw materials, and so on. While the Entente were at this time prepared to recognize Japanese interests in a Chinese Manchuria, and frankly the Western powers were ambivalent about Taiwan, this was a bit much.
There were a few other factors. Frankly, after some of the reports from Hong Kong, Borneo, and Saigon of what happened to European prisoners of war, there was a bit of a demand for blood. Moreover, many felt that the back of the Japanese army had been broken in the truly awful combat in the jungles of Borneo and Indochina, with the forces occupying China capable of piecemeal resistance at best to the Allied war machine. And finally, there was the threat posed by the Soviet Union, to which we shall return at a later date. Given Soviet provocations elsewhere, there was a growing concern that Stalin was planning to intervene in the war against Japan after it had been suitably bled white. The idea of a Communist China horrified the Entente in a way that a Japanese Manchuria did not, and, given the results of the coming months, this feeling would prove justified.
The Entente successes were, of course, stunning, for in China the Entente advantages in mobility and firepower come into play. Japanese armor, such as the Type 97 Chi-Ha, have nothing that can compete with the French tanks such as the ARL 46, while even the Indian divisions have enough motor vehicle support to give them a mobility unmatched by the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Japanese had to keep a significant number of forces at home, worried by the American buildup in the Philippines and a possible Soviet intervention. Said intervention came, of course, during the October Revolution.
The Entente success was staggering, and witnessed the liberation of Shanghai only two months after Hongwu began
Soviet-Japanese tensions during the 1930s and 1940s had oscillated between neutrality and outright warfare, culminating, in the aftermath of the Berlin Summit, in a nonaggression pact. For the most part, it had been beneficial for the two nations; Stalin supplied the Japanese with generous supplies of oil, nickel, and other raw materials, as well as purchasing goods for Japan on the world market (with a generous mark up, of course). In return, Japan had provided some crucial aid for Stalin, such as equipment for his new warships. And the war had been beneficial for Stalin, letting him extend his sphere of influence into Iran and display Soviet power by dispatching the Sovetskii Soyuz and its sister warships to the Soviet naval base at Cadiz. But at the end of the day, Stalin never saw the Japanese as an ally of the USSR, and the turn of the war meant it was time for more vigorous measures.
Japan might have been able to hold on, even after the fall of Shanghai on October 5th. The Daqing oil field had finally come online in May, supplying Japan with the oil it desperately needed, and the Allies lacked the logistics, or frankly, desire to push that much further north immediately. Unfortunately, that oil, along with the coal mines and Steel industry Japan had painstakingly developed, meant that Manchuria was an industrial age treasure chest. And with the Japanese frantically diverting their army south into Central China, the Soviet declaration of war on October 16, 1943 came at a most inopportune moment.
When the world was first informed of the war, many couldn’t help but laugh at Stalin’s decision. The Red Army had showed itself vastly inferior to the Finnish army in 1939 and 1940, and the Japanese, despite being outclassed in China, had proven themselves to entirely capable fighters. Thus, more than a few commentators were smugly predicting that the Soviets would once again get a bloody nose, illustrate their military incompetence, and yet also tie up enough Soviet forces that the Entente would be able to reach Beijing early in 1944. They were considerably less smug when the Soviets reached Pusan by the end of December.
By 1943, the Soviet military, on land, sea, and air, was an entirely different beast than it had been even ten years ago.
_____________________________________________
Rather than discuss the entire Soviet military, it is worthwhile to focus on just one branch as an illustration of how far the USSR had come in a few short years. In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union had cut military expenditures significantly, and its navy was cut to a bare minimum. Indeed, the Soviet Navy lacked even a symbolic Pacific and Arctic fleet until the 1930s, and as the Tsarist officers had largely been, umm, made superfluous, the fleet seemed destined to wither into a few warships to guard the Soviet coastline.
Yet even during the 1920s, debates on the merits of a larger Soviet Navy had begun. At the former Imperial Naval Academy (now the Voroshilov Naval War College) ex-tsarist officers taught Soviet sailors that to command the seas, the USSR needed a traditional high seas fleet of battleships and cruisers. The proponents of this “old-school” approach contrasted with those who envisioned guarding the Soviet coastlines with a new approach, using land-based aircraft and submarines. In typical Stalinist fashion, the old-school was purged and their ideas promptly adopted by Stalin.
Nevertheless, until Stalin’s Five Year Plans, these ideas remained something of a daydream. The Five Year Plans called for a dramatic increase in Soviet shipbuilding capacity, not just in Leningrad and along the Black Sea, but in a series of new facilities which are a testament to the achievements of a totalitarian. Above the Arctic Circle, 120,000 men labored to build a shipyard at Severodvinsk after 1957, building a causeway that could accommodate two of the Sovetskii Soyuz class battleships side by side. 280 miles up the Amur River the Soviets Shipyard 199 at Komsomolsk. Since the Amur wasn’t deep enough, larger ships had to be towed downstream to be fitted at coastal shipyards, but its location was out of easy reach by the Japanese.
Thus the Soviet Union achieved something not even the United States could aspire to, building a blue-water navy within its continental heartland.
Nevertheless, the Soviet Union, recognizing the limits of USSR’s naval engineers, turned abraod to buy whatever was necessary: blueprints, weapons, and even entire warships. The Italian firm Ansaldo of Genoa designed blueprints for a forty-two thousand ton battleship [1]. Another Italian firm, Oderi-Terni-Orlando of Livorno, built and delivered the Tashkent, the world’s fastest destroyer at the time it was constructed. Gibbs & Cox of Philadelphia was approached to design an battleship-carrier. So serious was Stalin that in 1938 he personally approached the American ambassador about having an American firm build a battleship for the Soviet Union.
As you can gather, the USSR was in the midst of a massive naval expansion, and the 1936 plan called for a fleet of 15 battleships, 53 cruisers, 162 destroyers, and 412 submarines to be ready by 1947. The Soviet naval staff also insisted upon the construction of aircraft carriers in spite of Stalin's dislike of this warship type (97, 200). In August 1939, the plan of 1936 was thus altered so that the 1947 Soviet navy was projected to consist of 8 battleships, 16 battle cruisers, two aircraft carriers, 31 cruisers, 216 destroyers, and no fewer than 442 submarines (103). While the cruiser and especially aircraft carrier building was modest, the heavy surface unit (i.e., battleships and battle cruisers) and submarine programs exceeded those of all other naval powers.
What motivated Stalin, and the Soviet Union, to pursue such a naval strategy? To be sure, he was reacting to international developments. The British King George V class battleships, and the Japanese Yamato, were obvious concerns for a nation who had seen both island nations occupy its territory less than a generation ago. The reborn Pacific Fleet was to account for almost 65% percent of naval construction, to defend the Far East, occupy the Kuriles, and disrupt their communications. The Baltic Fleet was supposed to ensure control of the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea Fleet was supposed to challenge the combined forces of Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey.It must be stressed that for the Soviet Union, this was only a defensive measure in a time of heightening uncertainty, but the Spanish Civil War helped to crystallize Stalin’s interest in a large fleet.
While the Soviets took control of the Republican Navy, manning, for instance, its submarines with Soviet sailors, the consequences were frankly embarassing. Red Air Force pilots proved to be a greater danger to the convoys they were supposed to protect than to the Italian navy, and when there was talk of sending a Soviet naval task force to join an international effort to protect shipping to Spain, Admiral Orlov, commander of the Red Navy, was forced to conclude that the results would be disastrous and cause an international embarrassment.
Building a navy from scratch was no laughing matter, of course, and Stalin’s dreams of rapidly building a navy soon had to be scaled down. Yet by 1943 the Soviets had nevertheless completed two of the Sovetskii Soyuz class battleships, the largest in the world after the Yamato (which meant that, by the end of 1943, they were the largest in the world) even as the Japanese and Entente navies weakened themselves in the Pacific war.
The problem, of course, was what to do with them. Trapped in the Black Sea, the Baltic, and by Japan in the Pacific, the Blue water navy that Stalin was building seemed bereft of a home. If only there was some sort of friendly state allied to the Soviet Union with a series of fantastic ports on the Atlantic. Preferably near a major British naval base, like Gibraltar.
Oh, right.
Jokes aside, the painful growth of the Soviet Navy was just one of the ways the military expanded under Joseph Stalin. We can point to other changes in the aftermath of the Finnish debacle, as the military underwent a series of painful reforms to increase its effectiveness, began to emphasize motorization and greater training for its officers. The Soviet air force upgraded from the painfully obsolete Yak-1 to more combat capable fighters, such as the La-7. In short, Stalin had created a world-class military force that was in significant ways the best in the world. The only question, as Japan desperately sought a peace treaty in December of 1943, was what it would do with it.
The Soviets paid little attention to the Japanese surrender, sweeping south and capturing Beijing even as the Japanese withdrew
[1] This, and the rest of Soviet naval developments, were the OTL plans. The only changes have been me guessing how much of it the Soviets could've actually built, as opposed to how much Stalin could have conceived. My guess is probably half of the major capital ships, and between 2/5 to 3/5 of the rest of the fleet.
Wow...China truly IS the middle kingdom...the West and the East are now going to have to figure out how to divide the spoils...
Will Stalin spring for Mao's power, or will Mao have to make way for a Stalinist 'puppet.' I just can't see Stalin giving back all off Manchuria and northern China to someone not under his power...and with the Etente bereft of nuclear weapons...what stick will they use to coerce him to respect Chinese autonomy?
TheExecuter
Will Stalin spring for Mao's power, or will Mao have to make way for a Stalinist 'puppet.' I just can't see Stalin giving back all off Manchuria and northern China to someone not under his power...and with the Etente bereft of nuclear weapons...what stick will they use to coerce him to respect Chinese autonomy?
TheExecuter
Yea, I kind of rushed through this post, but frankly writing the war gave me a fair amount of trouble, and I had to paper over some of the things that went oddly during it. Like, umm, the fact that the Japanese had no troops in Korea, or that they'd lost most of their men in a huge kessel in Laos.
And the political implications are interesting. While Stalin might not want to give back Manchuria and North China, he would also like to keep the League as far away as possible from Soviet borders; a neutral China might be one way to do it. And even better, a neutral China where he's supporting the CCP in a civil war might be even better...
I came across an interesting poem written by A. P. Herbert, a British MP who has the honor of writing the only poem in history to be classified Most Secret by His Majesty's Government.
The Map Game
It's jolly to look at the map
And finish the foe in a day.
It's not easy to get at the chap;
These neutrals are so in the way.
But if you say 'What would you do
To fill the aggressor with gloom?'
Well, we might drop a bomb on Baku,
Or what about bombs on Batum?
Other methods, of course, may be found.
We might send a fleet up the Inn:
We might burrow far underground
And come up in the heart of Berlin.
But I think a more promising clue
To the totalitarian doom
Is the dropping of bombs on Baku,
And perhaps a few bombs on Batum.
The scale of the map should be small
If you're winning the war in a day.
It mustn't show mountains at all,
For mountains may be in the way.
But, taking a statesmanlike view,
And sitting at home in a room,
I'm all for some bombs on Baku
And, of course, a few bombs on Batum.
It's jolly to look at the map
And finish the foe in a day.
It's not easy to get at the chap;
These neutrals are so in the way.
But if you say 'What would you do
To fill the aggressor with gloom?'
Well, we might drop a bomb on Baku,
Or what about bombs on Batum?
Other methods, of course, may be found.
We might send a fleet up the Inn:
We might burrow far underground
And come up in the heart of Berlin.
But I think a more promising clue
To the totalitarian doom
Is the dropping of bombs on Baku,
And perhaps a few bombs on Batum.
The scale of the map should be small
If you're winning the war in a day.
It mustn't show mountains at all,
For mountains may be in the way.
But, taking a statesmanlike view,
And sitting at home in a room,
I'm all for some bombs on Baku
And, of course, a few bombs on Batum.
Enewald said:
Don't feel too bad for China. Chiang's still a jerk.
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So the red bear has finally shown its ugly face!! Well it'll be intresting to see if the Soviets will trust Maos Red China or if the British will force the Soviets to give up the Chinese lands, which i do not think they will do!
But one thing is I believe certain - the western military leaders will be shocked by the Red-blitzkrieg and I do wonder if this will lead to some serious contemplation of western military strategy! Especially the Poles will/must overwork their strategy or politics!
This situation could generate some very intresting perspective on Poland! Losing some western land to Germany, albeit with a plebistice, they wouldn't still want to lose more land (this time even more square meters) to their archenemy!
So, do I see a hint that Spain is in the Stalinist camp?
But one thing is I believe certain - the western military leaders will be shocked by the Red-blitzkrieg and I do wonder if this will lead to some serious contemplation of western military strategy! Especially the Poles will/must overwork their strategy or politics!
This situation could generate some very intresting perspective on Poland! Losing some western land to Germany, albeit with a plebistice, they wouldn't still want to lose more land (this time even more square meters) to their archenemy!
So, do I see a hint that Spain is in the Stalinist camp?
I wonder if Stalin is going to "liberate" Europe next? He has the Army and the air force to Do so and the Soviet Fleet is no longer a joke now as it certainly out classes the German Fleet and probably is a match for the French fleet and can easily reach the Atlantic from its bases in Republican Spain.
PS I like to see a world wide naval comparison if that is possible in the next update.
PS I like to see a world wide naval comparison if that is possible in the next update.
I don't feel sorry for Chiang, only for those goes guys who are under soviet rule in China.
Britain will be, umm, annoyed. I'm trying to think of how Britain responds, actually, since:
1) This is clearly provocatory, and aggressive.
2) Nobody in the West cares about Manchuria. But they do care about China, and
3) Stalin just took a territory larger than France for a few thousand dead after the Entente spent a couple years beating him back.
The Popular Democracy of Spain welcomes the only nation who helped it out.
Hrmm. I wonder if there's anything in Spain like a Bay of Pigs?