Wasn't the Luftwaffe what the Third Reich called their air force? Wouldn't it still be Luftstreitskraft or whatever under the Kaiserreich?
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German here: We always called it Luftwaffe. There is no other term for it - not even nowadays
Informal 'Luftstreitkräfte' would be possible, but still informal.
Having done a bit of research into it it looks like Luftstreitkräfte was the name used back while the German air force was part of the German army. After it became a separate organisation it was called the Luftwaffe so I'm going to assume that in this TL the separation into a separate service and the name change took place just like in our TL.
Is it possible that Britain might end up being divided between a German dominated south-east and a French/League of Nations puppet/ally in the rest. Maybe offer Edward VIII the crown in order to win back the Canadians and the Entente? Alternatively you could just balkanize into England, Scotland and Wales in order to remove a potential rival...
talt
Portsmouth
Following the completion of the invasion fleet in October, everything was ready for the French Empire’s invasion of Britain.
A special bomber squadron, known only as the ‘17th Group’, had been armed with two of the primitive atomic weapons developed at Project Jericho and flown to a specially cleared airfield outside of Lyons.
And in Marseille, General Delestraint and his elite armoured corps, consisting of five tank divisions and four divisions of mechanised cavalry was embarking onto the invasion barges.
On November the 15th the invasion barges, escorted by the French First Fleet, were in the channel, having managed to find a gap in the autumn storms in which to invade with the remnants of the Republican Navy too weak to challenge their approach.
Just after midnight on the 16th, Delestraint’s first wave of mechanised cavalry and amphibious tanks hit the beaches of the islands to the east of Portsmouth, Hayling Island and Thorney Island, taking advantage of the darkness to surprise the Home Guard troops defending the beaches and quickly get off of the beaches before digging in and waiting.
Just before dawn, as reports of potential landings on Hayling and Thorney had just caused the dispatch of British Army units from Portsmouth and Southampton, a bright flash lit the sky to the West of Hayling Island.
The people of Southampton, just across the Solent, climbing out of their bunkers after another night of bombing by the Luftwaffe would have seen a giant pillar of white and orange flame lighting up the sky to the east where Portsmouth used to be. The city of Portsmouth, home of the Republican Navy, had just become the first people on Earth to be targeted by an atomic bomb.
The 22 kilotonne bomb had been dropped over the Hilsea district in the north of Portsmouth, a location chosen as the hub of all the routes on and off the island which the main part of Portsmouth was built on. Though the incoming planes had been detected by British radar, the small number of aircraft detected had caused the air raid warning to be called off - due to limited fuel the Republican Air Force had adopted a policy of only engaging major air raids.
The blast itself is estimated to have instantly killed around 50,000 of Portsmouth’s population of 220,000, flattening and engulfing in fire approximately half of the town. However, the strong offshore breeze that morning carried both the firestorm and deadly fallout south over the remainder of the city, where, in a humanitarian disaster that would take days and weeks to complete, another 120,000 people would be killed. All told, the estimated loss of life in the atomic bombing of Portsmouth was 190,000 men, women and children.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy of the attack was that it was a distraction. While the British forces in the surrounding area attempted to contain the firestorm and bring aid to the devastated city, General Delestraint took advantage of the chaos and the destruction of the Portsmouth section of the coast road, which prevented British reinforcements from arriving, to bring all his forces ashore, seizing the town of Havant with only minor casualties on his part as well as the RAF airfield on Thorney Island.
From Havant, French tanks circled cross-country north of Portsmouth, encircling and cutting off Southampton and the last major concentration of British troops on the south coast. With more and more French soldiers arriving, Southampton and its defenders were forced to surrender, allowing its docks to be captured mostly intact, even as General Delestraint launched a lighting advance across the South Downs, heading north east along the A3 towards London.
Such was the disarray of the British forces that it was not until the French advance reached the small town of Petersfield, nestled in the heart of miles of beautiful farmland, that the first significant resistance was encountered.
Here local Home Guard units, reinforced by an infantry division from the military bases to the north at Farnham, had dug in to put up a brutal, house-by-house delaying action to slow down the French advance long enough for overwhelming British reinforcements to arrive and drive the invaders back into the sea.
However, up against the mechanised and armoured forces of the French invasion force, the British defenders were overwhelmed and defeated in just 45 minutes of brutal fighting which destroyed most of the town and killed almost 90% of its inhabitants. It is a mark of the speed of the French invasion that Petersfield’s residents had not even had time to evacuate before Delestraint arrived.
It was only when the French reached Godalming and its army bases that the advance was blunted. Though unable to hold the town, the British defenders were able to mount a fighting retreat backwards through the village of Shalford to the town of Guildford.
It was here that Delestraint ran smack up against what was known locally as the Hog’s Back - a natural strip of thin, high ground that ran across most of Surrey and which, along with the Wey Navigation (a series of canals and ponds), formed the heavily fortified GHQ Stop Line - a line of implacable defences which crossed the entirety of southern England from west to east and which was designed to protect London from and contain an expected imperialist invasion.
The GHQ Stop Line was one of a network of defensive lines crossing Britain
With mounting casualties as his troops encountered the barbed wire, tank traps and pillboxes of the GHQ Line, Delestraint was forced to halt his advance and instead concentrated on consolidating his substantial beachhead with French soldiers systematically fanning out across Hampshire and southern Surrey to overwhelm remaining resistance and establish their own defensive line around the first piece of French-occupied Britain.
Following the completion of the invasion fleet in October, everything was ready for the French Empire’s invasion of Britain.
A special bomber squadron, known only as the ‘17th Group’, had been armed with two of the primitive atomic weapons developed at Project Jericho and flown to a specially cleared airfield outside of Lyons.
And in Marseille, General Delestraint and his elite armoured corps, consisting of five tank divisions and four divisions of mechanised cavalry was embarking onto the invasion barges.
On November the 15th the invasion barges, escorted by the French First Fleet, were in the channel, having managed to find a gap in the autumn storms in which to invade with the remnants of the Republican Navy too weak to challenge their approach.
Just after midnight on the 16th, Delestraint’s first wave of mechanised cavalry and amphibious tanks hit the beaches of the islands to the east of Portsmouth, Hayling Island and Thorney Island, taking advantage of the darkness to surprise the Home Guard troops defending the beaches and quickly get off of the beaches before digging in and waiting.
Just before dawn, as reports of potential landings on Hayling and Thorney had just caused the dispatch of British Army units from Portsmouth and Southampton, a bright flash lit the sky to the West of Hayling Island.
The people of Southampton, just across the Solent, climbing out of their bunkers after another night of bombing by the Luftwaffe would have seen a giant pillar of white and orange flame lighting up the sky to the east where Portsmouth used to be. The city of Portsmouth, home of the Republican Navy, had just become the first people on Earth to be targeted by an atomic bomb.
The 22 kilotonne bomb had been dropped over the Hilsea district in the north of Portsmouth, a location chosen as the hub of all the routes on and off the island which the main part of Portsmouth was built on. Though the incoming planes had been detected by British radar, the small number of aircraft detected had caused the air raid warning to be called off - due to limited fuel the Republican Air Force had adopted a policy of only engaging major air raids.
The blast itself is estimated to have instantly killed around 50,000 of Portsmouth’s population of 220,000, flattening and engulfing in fire approximately half of the town. However, the strong offshore breeze that morning carried both the firestorm and deadly fallout south over the remainder of the city, where, in a humanitarian disaster that would take days and weeks to complete, another 120,000 people would be killed. All told, the estimated loss of life in the atomic bombing of Portsmouth was 190,000 men, women and children.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy of the attack was that it was a distraction. While the British forces in the surrounding area attempted to contain the firestorm and bring aid to the devastated city, General Delestraint took advantage of the chaos and the destruction of the Portsmouth section of the coast road, which prevented British reinforcements from arriving, to bring all his forces ashore, seizing the town of Havant with only minor casualties on his part as well as the RAF airfield on Thorney Island.
From Havant, French tanks circled cross-country north of Portsmouth, encircling and cutting off Southampton and the last major concentration of British troops on the south coast. With more and more French soldiers arriving, Southampton and its defenders were forced to surrender, allowing its docks to be captured mostly intact, even as General Delestraint launched a lighting advance across the South Downs, heading north east along the A3 towards London.
Such was the disarray of the British forces that it was not until the French advance reached the small town of Petersfield, nestled in the heart of miles of beautiful farmland, that the first significant resistance was encountered.
Here local Home Guard units, reinforced by an infantry division from the military bases to the north at Farnham, had dug in to put up a brutal, house-by-house delaying action to slow down the French advance long enough for overwhelming British reinforcements to arrive and drive the invaders back into the sea.
However, up against the mechanised and armoured forces of the French invasion force, the British defenders were overwhelmed and defeated in just 45 minutes of brutal fighting which destroyed most of the town and killed almost 90% of its inhabitants. It is a mark of the speed of the French invasion that Petersfield’s residents had not even had time to evacuate before Delestraint arrived.
It was only when the French reached Godalming and its army bases that the advance was blunted. Though unable to hold the town, the British defenders were able to mount a fighting retreat backwards through the village of Shalford to the town of Guildford.
It was here that Delestraint ran smack up against what was known locally as the Hog’s Back - a natural strip of thin, high ground that ran across most of Surrey and which, along with the Wey Navigation (a series of canals and ponds), formed the heavily fortified GHQ Stop Line - a line of implacable defences which crossed the entirety of southern England from west to east and which was designed to protect London from and contain an expected imperialist invasion.
The GHQ Stop Line was one of a network of defensive lines crossing Britain
With mounting casualties as his troops encountered the barbed wire, tank traps and pillboxes of the GHQ Line, Delestraint was forced to halt his advance and instead concentrated on consolidating his substantial beachhead with French soldiers systematically fanning out across Hampshire and southern Surrey to overwhelm remaining resistance and establish their own defensive line around the first piece of French-occupied Britain.
So sad and tragic, especially when you think that only 3 decades earlier, British and French soldiers were dying by the hundreds of thousands side by side trying to defend France from the German menace. Seems that now the old Entente truly lies in ruins.
Whatever you do to Britain after this, I hope you bring alot of MP's and counter-insurgency troops, I fear the British Syndicalists will fight a massive insurrection in order to keep resisting your French armies, especially in the wake of such a monstrous nuclear attack on Portsmouth.
Whatever you do to Britain after this, I hope you bring alot of MP's and counter-insurgency troops, I fear the British Syndicalists will fight a massive insurrection in order to keep resisting your French armies, especially in the wake of such a monstrous nuclear attack on Portsmouth.
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Would invasion have been impossible without the bomb? It seems such a waste of life.
Please, after this return the UK to the Exiles. It may help the British People in overcoming this disaster.
I mean it's better than putting a French puppet on the Throne.
I mean it's better than putting a French puppet on the Throne.
Pretty much, yes it would. I could have attacked in any number of places but there's no way I would have been able to win the battle before the British brought in reinforcements from surrounding regions and forced me to call off my attack. The real problem with invading Britain is always getting a foothold and holding onto it. Once you've got one it becomes comparatively easy. So in this case the French decided to use a nuke to blast a whole in the British defences - under a different leadership than Napoleon IV and De Gaulle the French might well have just targeted the docks, sparing most of the population and using the bombing to attempt to force a British surrender. But in this instance, the rulers of France really aren't that bothered by the loss of life and are perfectly happy to use nuclear weapons as just another part of conventional warfare.
Which, admittedly, is pretty damn bleak and tragic - not least because I have friends who live in Portsmouth. But I made a decision a while back not to make Nationalist France out to seem like the good guys all the time.
Because they were cheaper to build.
If the French already used nuclear weapons on Britain, then placing some Bonaparte family member on British throne won't hurt either...
Now how's that for payback for Waterloo, eh Tommies? You should exile the entirety of the TUC to some God forsaken island in the Atlantic, just to complete the payback.
Were there actually any spare Bonaparte's lying around Europe at this time? I wasn't aware they had that many relatives to spare...
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