The Midwinter Offensives
Despite the capture of Manchester, General Mer was not willing to rest on his laurels. While he remained in Manchester with his command staff, he dispatched his men east where they swiftly pushed their way through industrial south Yorkshire and Sheffield to sweep round and launch an offensive into Lincolnshire from the north - offering the prospect of the French being able to divide Britain in two.
While British forces in the Black Country around Birmingham attempted to take advantage of this to launch an attack to retake Manchester, they found themselves beaten back after a few miles by French infantry freshly arrived in the port of Liverpool who then proceeded to swiftly link up their lines with those of General Mer’s troops, forming defensive positions strong enough to dissuade any British attempt at regaining their lost territory.
On Christmas day, the French offensive into Lincolnshire finally succeeded, forcing the British to retreat and advancing towards Lincoln and, crucially, severing the east coast mainline of Britain’s railway network.
As the end of the year arrived it found the French deeply entrenched across the cities of Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln, with their defensive lines stretching from the west coast of England to the east coast - cutting the British forces in the north of Britain off from those in the south.
However, already French operations in what was being called the Northern Zone were being hampered by a lack of supplies and, crucially, by a lack of fuel. With General Delestraint’s continuing Yorkshire offensive desperately needing supplies, there simply weren’t enough supplies available to support General Mer and newly arrived General Dentz who faced the prospect of the Northern Zone becoming an enormous pocket in which their troops could be trapped.
In order to ward off this threat the two generals surprised the British by launching a midwinter offensive towards Hull rather than doing the expected thing and digging in further. This aggressive tactic, while using up even more scarce resources, was calculated to keep the British so off kilter that they would have no chance to launch a counter-offensive.
By the 17th of January this offensive had come to an end successfully with the French in control of Hull and its port, offering the potential of resupply for the French on the east coast as well as the west - if only the supplies were available.
However, the French were not the only ones launching a midwinter offensive. In German occupied Russia the native gendarmerie found themselves overwhelmed by a sudden Bolshevik uprising by partisans tacitly supported by Soviet troops who moved into occupy all the areas the partisans successfully took. This, the New Year Uprising, was a massive gamble by the Soviet leadership but one calculated to rouse the ethnic Russians in a revolt so large that the German garrisons would be forced to withdraw rather than fight.
Faced with the prospect of either surrender or a costly war in Russia at a time when the German economy was already stretched to breaking point by years of war, the SDP government chose to negotiate. In the space of 24 hours, and after terse negotiations, the German Empire decided to recognise the Soviet Republic as the legitimate government of northern Russia - the first time it had been recognised by any foreign government - thereby making the surrender of German occupied Russia to the Soviets merely the return of territory to its legitimate owner rather than an international humiliation. However, with this massive gain for the Soviets came significant conditions - the first was the guarantee of peaceful, unmolested withdrawal for all ethnic Germans and their families and property from Russia. The second, crucially, was the signing of a non-aggression pact, eliminating the threat of the red menace to the German Empire once and for all. And the third was the Soviet recognition and guarantee of the borders of Greater Ukraine, effectively promising not to attempt to regain any more territory.
This approach by Germany’s SDP government was a diplomatic policy known as appeasement, which had been a key pledge of the SDP manifesto and which was defined as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly dangerous."
While the enactment of this policy was completely in-keeping with the SDP manifesto, it received an incredibly mixed reaction from the German public and utter condemnation by the German aristocracy and conservative press. Coupled with the horrifying stories emerging from the Soviet Republic following the creation of the brutal KGB security service, this policy would be enough to effectively doom any hope the SDP might have had of re-election.