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The Eastern Vikings, Part 4 - Baltic Megacampaign

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Seems most of you side with the military in this regard, keeping the Balkans under Estonian occupation until France is pacified. Of course, there's still the matter of how the communists could throw a wrench into the whole process, and how much the Balkan states may or may not be willing to cooperate with Estonian leadership in the first place.
 
I think democratic elections should be held with fascist and utranationalist parties banned. Occupation of balkans may be carried out under the pretext of protecting "fairness" of elections. Would it be truth or cover up would depend on Estonian plans :)
 
there needs to be an election in which every village decides if they want to stay with Estonia permanently, return to the respective country that they were in, or be part of a new country altogether. Once that is finished small repatriations etc can be made to make countries contiguous.

Afterwards can be elections for each country with fascist etc parties banned and of course each country is a parliamentary democracy.
 
I agree with eoncommander, all these post-war settlement plans should be indeed put on hold, until the enemies of Estonia are truly defeated. France being given a bloody nose is good news. About time their supposed superiority is finally proven untrue. Hope the Italians are able to rally further, would be interesting to see if it's the Italian flag that will be raised on top of Paris at the end of all of this.
 
Estonia will have to tread carefully to keep the Balkans happy without leaving a threat on its southwest border.

Italy has certainly put up an impressive fight against the French, first holding the Alps for so long and now pushing into French territory. Perhaps France is not as strong as everyone thinks.
 
It would be nice to keep the Balkans occupied, but that may be politically impossible at this stage... Given that, the best thing is to take the fight to France as quickly as possible, before the Balkan situation has a chance to become a problem. If Italy is invading their territory, they still haven't capitulated Andalusia, and they can't even squash Germany, they cannot be prepared to face a three-front war.
 
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I wanted to ask, how do you edit the save game you receive from the converters? Do you just mod like ordinary hoi4 mods or edit the save file? Also, how do you reduce border-gore (do you use scenario editor or manually change the province and state ownership)?
I have been following this AAR from its CK2 days and I really liked how you presented the story! :)
 
PerhapsItsChondoLal said:
I wanted to ask, how do you edit the save game you receive from the converters? Do you just mod like ordinary hoi4 mods or edit the save file? Also, how do you reduce border-gore (do you use scenario editor or manually change the province and state ownership)?
I have been following this AAR from its CK2 days and I really liked how you presented the story! :)
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Glad you're enjoying!

So I began with the base file produced by @Idhrendur and co.'s fantastic converter. From there, I did most of my changes just by tweaking files -- editing the OOB files for starting military strength, using the province history files to tweak the number of factories/resources available and so on, and then creating custom national focus trees where it was needed to help certain effects take place. I'm not very good at modding events, so most of my significant in-game events were handled via customized and manually-trigger foci.

Also, a Merry Christmas and happy holiday season to all of you! I'm happy to report that the move-in process at my new home is just about finished, so you can count on returning to a more regular cadence of updates soon! There's still a lot of legs left in this story and I'm excited to get to writing the next chapters!
 
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Caught up after a few months’ absence from this story, and I’m glad to see things looking up for Estonia! I agree that letting go of the Balkans completely is a touch premature, but similarly a full-on military occupation doesn’t sound at all like a good way to inculcate pro-Estonian (and pro-democratic) feeling. Some sort of accommodation is going to have to be reached whereby the Balkans get their autonomy without sacrificing the gains against fascism. Strong support for the anti-fascist struggle on the ground seems to me like the way to go.
 
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1942 - The Fires Merge, Part 3​

Coalition or Communism - The Estonian Presidential Election of 1942
May and June of 1942 were extremely tense months in Estonia.

May saw the final end of the nation's war with the Czech Axis, with Estonian troops working hard to secure the formerly fascist nations. This was not an easy task -- although the armies of the fascist states had been broken, pockets of resistance still remained all across the Balkans. Surviving soldiers teamed up with furious partisans to form a number of roaming militia brigades, and guerilla raids became commonplace across occupied territory. Many citizens of the Balkan states had rejoiced at being liberated from their heavy-handed authoritarian regimes, but they were still far from safe. Estonian soldiers, working in concert with pro-democracy militia groups and local police forces, faced a stiff challenge as they tried to contain the violence.

At the same time, an ideological conflict over the best way to handle the Balkan states was brewing at home in the lead-up to a critical election in June. Kristjan Lennart's successful wartime leadership had earned him a great deal of popularity, but he was dogged by opposition from two sides: his military officers and his coalition government partners. Prominent voices at the highest level of Estonia's military command were calling for an extended occupation of the Balkans, lasting as long as several years before new governments could be formed. Lennart, on the other hand, wanted to restore sovereignty to the Balkan states as quickly as possible, establishing democratic governments supported by Estonian funding and diplomatic aid.

Lennart also faced political opposition from the Estonian Communist Party, which pushed for Estonia to more closely align itself to Ibrahim Jaziri's communist state in Arabia -- the best ally against worldwide fascism, by their estimation. They lobbied for territorial concessions to Arabia in Bulgaria and Greece, and they resisted Lennart's suggestion to return Austria to Imperial Germany, given that the Monarchist Compact was still officially at war with Arabia despite the fact that direct hostilities had largely ceased after the occupation of Africa.

It was the ECP that put forward Lennart's most significant political rival in the 1942 election: Kalju Leppik.

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Leppik was chosen as the party's new leader and presidential candidate early in 1942, and became Lennart's primary rival in that year's election. A retired military officer who served in the Great War, Leppik had traveled to Arabia on several occasions to observe the Arabian military, and had taken some of their techniques back home to train communist paramilitary groups within Estonia. He was a charismatic speaker with a talent for stirring up his left-wing base, and he had just enough credibility as a former soldier to attract some hawkish voters disillusioned with Lennart's perceived soft stance on the Balkans.

The two were the clear front-runners by the beginning of June, and they faced off in a series of three lengthy debates that were broadcast over Estonian radio. Both men were united in their desire to see fascism stamped out worldwide, and both promised to support the global effort to defeat Henri Laurent's resurgent Carolingian Empire. That, however, was their only shared position. Lennart waxed poetic about a united coalition of free democratic states safeguarding liberty and harmony, while Leppik wove great visions of a workers-first Estonia that pledged to bring Estonia's lower classes the freedom that capitalism would deny them, combining the massive military and economic power of Estonia and Arabia to guarantee a communist utopia across Europe.

The election had high stakes, and it sharply divided the country. Communist demonstrators were frequently harassed by their rivals, eventually leading Leppik to begin giving speeches flanked by uniformed members of his communist paramilitary. This led to a decrease in violence at communist rallies, but it also proved to be a crucial mistake; as his party began to appear more and more militarized, many swing voters began to see echoes of fascism's similar tactics, and Leppik lost a great deal of momentum outside of his own party.

But in the end, that misstep likely mattered little. Lennart won re-election in a historic landslide, earning the highest percentage of votes in the history of Estonia's democracy. As a result, he was free to form a government entirely composed of members of his own conservative party. The communists didn't just lose their bid for the presidency -- they also lost their participation in the governing cabinet.

Now, there was no vocal minority party threatening to dissolve the government. Kristjan Lennart and his party were finally free to act without opposition.

Within a week of the election's certification, Lennart had assembled a new cabinet and gathered them, along with his military advisors, at the capital in Saaremaa to begin enacting his plans. Domestically, all efforts were to be directed toward the maximization of military production. Through the issuance of extensive government bonds and incentives, even more commercial factories were retooled to produce weapons, equipment, and vehicles, with the goal of further expanding the already-ballooning Estonian army in preparation for future hostilities. Diplomatically, he announced that the Balkan states would remain occupied by Estonian armed forces until the threat of France could be reduced enough to make the establishment of free states possible.

In the meantime, Estonian government officials would work in concert with elected local governors to help leverage the industrial capacity of the Balkan states in the war effort. Valuable oil from Wallachia and Dobrudja flowed into the strategic reserve, and Estonian contractors and military engineers worked to rebuild the Czechoslovakian factories crushed by airstrikes so that they could begin producing weapons for the army. It was not true freedom, at least not yet -- but it came with the promise of cooperation and future sovereignty once the region was more secure.

Militarily, Lennart gave a simply instruction to Army Chief Heino Sirk: prepare to execute War Plan Gold.

War Plan Gold - The Plan to Crush the Carolingian Ambition
Long before the 1942 election gave Kristjan Lennart free reign to implement his conservative policies, the officers of the Estonian military were already hard at work on War Plan Gold. As soon as it became clear that the war in the Balkans was on a winning trajectory, Lennart had tasked his Army Chief Heino Sirk with developing a detailed plan for an attack on France. Sirk had quickly gone to work with some of his best military minds, aided by a critical ally: the intelligence of the KL.

Thanks to years of careful intelligence-gathering by a vast network of agents, Sirk had a fairly reliable picture of France's military might -- and it was formidable. France, after all, had spent years fighting a multi-front war against the Monarchist Compact and German Entente, and in spite of some setbacks, they were still winning that war. The National Guard had over 1.5 million men active in the field, and the imposition of strict military service requirements meant that Henri Laurent had a deep reserve of manpower to draw on. The Guard also boasted Europe's largest armored force, fielding a staggering force of over 11,000 medium tanks -- more than triple the combined total of France's enemies. The vast majority of those were the battle-tested AMC-35, but over 1,000 of the cutting-edge S35 tank were already in the field, with hundreds of the S35 série E rolling off the lines each month.

Henri Laurent had built a nigh-unstoppable military machine, and Heino Sirk had the unenviable task of drawing up a plan to beat it. Estonia had the clear advantage in terms of manpower, with almost 3 million men deployed or in training -- double what France could field. But only a fraction of that manpower could be brought to bear thanks to two key strategic concerns. The first was Saudi Arabia, whose war with Persia was progressing swiftly toward victory. With the recent political tensions in Estonia between the communists and other parties, a large number of soldiers had been earmarked to defend the sprawling Estonian-Arabian border, which extended from western Greece and Ekaterinodar all the way to the border with Perm.

The second issue was that the border between France and Estonia was rather small, meaning that only a limited number of divisions could effectively maneuver through it. Thanks to the strict drilling of the French infantry, the elite stormtroopers of the Croix-de-Feu, and France's massive legions of advanced medium tanks, the National Guard was simply tougher than the Estonian army pound-for-pound, man-for-man. Punching a hole through France's eastern border would be the toughest challenge yet faced by Estonia.

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In an effort to defeat the National Guard's advantage, Sirk planned to try to widen the front as much as possible early in the war. Ground troops, led by focused armored and mechanized attack groups, would advance into eastern France and attempt to capture Leipzig in the south, Berlin in the center, and Schwerin in the north, creating a new front line in hostile territory. While that was happening, Estonia's seasoned airborne veterans would drop into Schwerin to cut off supplies and reinforcements to the front. At the same time, ten divisions from the Republic Marine Corps would stage an amphibious assault on Jutland, marching south to secure Kiel and lock down the canal, opening a new front against the French and forcing all naval traffic to pass around the peninsula through a single, easily controllable route.

If War Plan Gold's first phase could be executed successfully, the French would be pushed out of the eastern Elbe Republic, allowing for north German refugees to begin returning home -- and returning to their critical factories. The support of more volunteer forces and the substantial industrial might of the Elbe Republic would be a valuable tool, and the increased pressure in the north would give Germany, Italy, and Andalusia some room to breathe.

That was, of course, a very large "if."
 
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Michaelangelo said:
It's about time that Estonia and France butted heads. I look forward to the inevitable death of fascism.
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Indeed, at long last the specter of fascism that looms over Europe shall be crushed.
 
RedTemplar said:
Diplomatically, he announced that the Balkan states would remain occupied by Estonian armed forces until the threat of France could be reduced enough to make the establishment of free states possible.
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So, Lennart wins a historic landslide, and then bows to the demands of the military establishment? Shows who's really in charge.

Not that I'm upset. Seems like democratic Estonia is in good shape for the coming fight.
 
Finally the French will get what they deserve.
 
France really seems like they should lose this. Even with the best army in the world, they're making the usual fascist mistake: too many enemies at once. Aside from an Arabian intervention - which seems like it would be awfully short-sighted on their part, but you never know with the AI - things look good for Estonia.
 
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eoncommander said:
So, Lennart wins a historic landslide, and then bows to the demands of the military establishment? Shows who's really in charge.

Not that I'm upset. Seems like democratic Estonia is in good shape for the coming fight.
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I don't see it as a capitulation to the military so much as a practical concession. If he were to quickly set up new democratic countries in the Balkans and then immediately go to war with France, it's likely that those young, fragile countries would become fast targets. By waiting until France is backpedaling, he can ensure the security of his new states.
 
Oooph, that is a big if.
 
Wonderful cliffhanger! Can't wait to see what happens next.
 
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