Chapter One – Securing the Second Republic (January 1936 – May 1937)
Chapter One – Securing the Second Republic
(January 1936 – May 1937)
Chwała Polsce!
(Glory to Poland)
(January 1936 – May 1937)
(Glory to Poland)
Introduction
This game started out as a filler after one of my existing AARs finished (Civis Romanus Sum, EU-Rome) and another ended its gameplay phase (Talking Turkey, HOI3). I haven’t played HOI4 much and haven’t yet got the more recent DLCs and thought I’d just give Poland a go, to re-familiarise and see whether I wanted to fork out the hard-earned for the rest of the DLC.
I’ve set it to Regular difficulty, as I’m really just a novice at this particular game and set it for non-historical focuses. I then hit play and by the time I got to early-mid 1937, some interesting stuff had happened, so I started taking screenshots. Next thing I knew, I was planning a hopefully simple and fairly short AAR, my first in HOI4! This first chapter takes us up to that point.
I only (!) have two other AARs going (as games) at the moment and am planning to get back into an HOI3 mod, so hopefully this will be manageable. The format will be gameplay with a bit of historical side narrative. HOI4 seems more political and strategic than HOI3 with its national focus trees, but there will be some scope for following tactical battles if they are significant. Playing a regional power like Poland should keep that within a reasonable scale, I think.
I will deliberately keep chapters a fair bit shorter than in some of my ‘bigger’ AARs, to hopefully make it more digestible. Finally, I’ve played ahead far enough to know there is a story to tell and one that I want to tell. For those not familiar with my other works, I don’t abandon AARs early and leave people hanging, so you can be assured of that. That’s enough preamble, on with the story!
=======
January 1936 – the Polish Government
Eighteen years after the Great War, Poland sits at the centre of Europe, pitched as ever between two great powers who still may hold the fate of Poland in their hands. To the west, Germany, now styled the German Reich and under the leadership of the rabid Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. To the east Russia, the old empire’s latest incarnation as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a den of Bolshevism full of Communist revolutionaries.
Ignacy Mościcki, President of Poland since 4 June 1926.
Mościcki was born on 1 December 1867 in Mierzanowo, a small village near Ciechanów, Congress Poland. After completing school in Warsaw, he studied chemistry at the Riga Polytechnicum. There he joined the Polish underground leftist organisation, Proletariat.
Upon graduating, he returned to Warsaw, but was threatened by the Tsarist secret police with life imprisonment in Siberia and was forced to emigrate in 1892 to London. In 1896 he was offered an assistantship at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. There he patented a method for cheap industrial production of nitric acid.
In 1912 Mościcki moved to Lviv (Polish: Lwów), in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he accepted a chair in physical chemistry and technical electrochemistry at the Lviv Polytechnic. In 1925 he was elected rector of the Lwów Polytechnic (as it was now called), but soon moved to Warsaw to continue his research at the Warsaw Polytechnic. In 1926, he became an Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society.
After Józef Piłsudski's May 1926 coup d'état, on 1 June 1926, Mościcki, once an associate of Piłsudski in the Polish Socialist Party, was elected president of Poland by the National Assembly on Piłsudski's recommendation, after Piłsudski had refused the office for himself.
As president, Mościcki was subservient to Piłsudski and never openly showed dissent from any aspect of the Marshal's leadership. After Piłsudski's death in 1935, his followers divided into three main factions: those supporting Mościcki as Piłsudski's successor (the Castle), those supporting General Edward Rydz-Śmigły (the Sanation Right), and those supporting Prime Minister Walery Sławek (the Sanation Left).
In OTL, with a view to eliminating Sławek from the game, Mościcki concluded a power-sharing agreement with Rydz-Śmigły, which saw Sławek marginalized as a serious political player by the end of the year. As a result of the agreement, Rydz-Śmigły would become the de facto leader of Poland until the outbreak of the war, and Mościcki remained influential by continuing in office as president.
Mościcki was the leading moderate figure in the regime, which was referred to as the "colonels' government" because of the major presence of military officers in the Polish government. Mościcki opposed many of the nationalist excesses of the more right-wing Rydz-Śmigły, but their pact remained more or less intact.
We shall see what transpires in this ATL.
Mościcki was the leading moderate figure in the regime, which was referred to as the "colonels' government" because of the major presence of military officers in the Polish government. Mościcki opposed many of the nationalist excesses of the more right-wing Rydz-Śmigły, but their pact remained more or less intact.
We shall see what transpires in this ATL.
The Polish army as deployed in January 1936. They would soon be divided into a western force (the 1st Army) and an eastern one (2nd Army).
=======
Political Developments: January 1936 to May 1937
The internal threats to Poland in early 1936 are real. The most pressing problem in January 1936 was the looming Peasants’ Strike. Only comprehensive agrarian reform would avert the severe disruption that was threatened.
The 1937 peasant strike in Poland, also known in some Polish sources as the Great Peasant Uprising was a mass strike and demonstration of peasants organised by the agrarian People's Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe, or SL) and aimed at the ruling sanacja government. It was the largest political protest in the Second Polish Republic and it is estimated that several million peasants took part in the demonstrations.
There was significant violence from both the strikers and the brutal police reaction. It was getting out of hand and on 20 August 1937 the SL leadership decided to stop the strike. The police, at first shocked at the magnitude of the protest, took their revenge, ‘pacifying’ villages violently. This in return provoked the hatred of the villagers. Altogether, around 1000 people were sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The strike failed to shift the official balance of power, as sanacja remained in control. However, it strengthened the Polish peasant movement, and was seen by the peasant activists as a successful demonstration of force. SL activists wanted to organise another strike in 1938, but due to the deteriorating international situation and growing threat of German aggression, it was called off.
There was significant violence from both the strikers and the brutal police reaction. It was getting out of hand and on 20 August 1937 the SL leadership decided to stop the strike. The police, at first shocked at the magnitude of the protest, took their revenge, ‘pacifying’ villages violently. This in return provoked the hatred of the villagers. Altogether, around 1000 people were sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The strike failed to shift the official balance of power, as sanacja remained in control. However, it strengthened the Polish peasant movement, and was seen by the peasant activists as a successful demonstration of force. SL activists wanted to organise another strike in 1938, but due to the deteriorating international situation and growing threat of German aggression, it was called off.
This became the President’s most important political priority in the early months of 1936. Mościcki would systematically implement a Four Year Plan, then pursue the improvements in rail services that would enable agrarian reforms to be implemented within the time frame required.
Later in 1936, with the Peasants’ Strike successfully averted, the Left and Right Sanation factions would threaten to destabilise the control of Mościcki’s ‘centrist’ (relatively speaking) Castle faction. Forsaking other political, diplomatic or industrial courses, Mościcki would move to complete the April Constitution.
This would pave the way through the development of Polish militarism to consolidate the Sanation government and then solidify the base of the Castle faction. Following this, the Sanation Right would be placated, with its leader Rydz-Śmigły being nominated as ‘the Second Man of the State’. Mościcki then moved to lock in support for himself to maintain the current dictatorship that ruled Poland without elections or the interference of the Sjem.
=======
Foreign Developments: January 1936 to May 1937
The big news for Poland and indeed the rest of Europe in early 1936 was the outbreak of a revolt in Germany on 11 March 1936 by a Military Junta against Hitler’s Nazi regime. The Junta started with possession of the western half of Germany, the Nazi’s retaining Berlin and the east. Fighting would rage across Germany in the coming months.
Not all major events during this initial period are recorded here [at that point I wasn’t planning to make this an AAR], but two major international events were announced on 1 May 1936.
=======
Anton Ludwig Friedrich August von Mackensen (born Mackensen; 6 December 1849), ennobled as "von Mackensen" in 1899, was a German field marshal. He commanded successfully during the Great War of 1914–1918 and became one of the German Empire's most prominent and competent military leaders. After the armistice of November 1918 the victorious Allies interned Mackensen in Serbia for a year.
Field Marshal von Mackensen
Mackensen and Hitler in 1935 during the Heldengedenktag in Berlin.
Hitler and Joseph Goebbels suspected Mackensen of disloyalty but refrained from taking action. Other senior NSDAP members also suspected him of disloyalty to the Third Reich, but nothing was proven against him. Until he pounced in March 1936.
=======
Also in 1936, there was a Communist revolution in Japan. Once the dust had settled, the Japanese Peoples’ Republic took over the Japanese Home Islands under Kyuichi Tokuda. Manchuria was taken over by former Chinese Emperor, Aisin Gioro Puyi, which became known as the Imperial Kwantung Territories, a Fascist government embracing Korea, Taiwan and Japan’s remaining Pacific possessions. Mengkukuo remained an independent and unaligned Fascist regime.
=======
13 May 1937 – a Stocktake
After the successful consolidation of the Polish dictatorship under Mościcki, his next step was into international relations. Poland would lean to neither the Fascists – whose fortunes in Germany and Japan had taken a massive blow during 1936, leaving Italy as its major European proponent – nor to the despised Communists, who were seemingly on the rise in Asia. Nor would an expansionist or imperialist course be taken, despite the dreams of some to revive the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the ‘between the seas’ movement.
Poland would throw in its lot with the Allies, led by the UK, its sole major power member at this time. This would bring both benefits and obligations, but Poland would need powerful friends if either Germany or Russia ever threatened her. By 13 May, this policy had been under development for a little over a month.
By this time, the standard Polish army division consisted of three brigades, each with three battalions. The one change since January 1936 had been to add an anti-tank battery to one of the brigades.
Research on infantry and support techs had largely attained or were progressing to 1936 levels in most of the main or initial lines of research. Military trucks were under development, in the hope of later introducing motorised divisions.
=======
And so stood Poland on 13 May 1937. There were hopes that the Military Junta in Germany would take steps to reintroduce democracy in due course. Certainly, the developing threat they seemed to have posed to all their neighbours in the less than three years of Hitler’s ill-fated Nazi regime seemed to have ebbed considerably.
Poland now considered the USSR to be its most significant threat and those few new deployments made since the beginning of 1936 had been sent to the eastern border. If Germany continued along a peaceful and even democratic path, divisions currently stationed in the west may well be redirected there.
A faint drumbeat of war could be heard: was it distant, or nearer by but very faint as yet? Only time would tell where conflict might erupt and if it did, how Poland may be affected by it. For now, the country would be developed, the military gradually modernised and grown and stronger diplomatic links with Britain and the Allies forged.
Last edited:
- 12
- 3
