A little calm before the final storm:
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]NOTICIARIOS Y DOCUMENTALES (April 1944)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif](soldiers shooting against a background of palm trees, long lines of asian-looking people walking towards the camera with their arms raised -not necessarily japanese- ships bombarding an unseen coast)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]In the island of Java, the Royal Australian Army continues a victorious advance toward the city of Jakarta. Japanese resistance is useless as the natives give a joyous reception to their liberators...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif](american carrier battlegroups, landing vehicles unloading Marines over some nameless pacific beach, Zeros and Mustangs dogfighting over the ocean, the same old stock footage of a flamethrower frying a japanese bunker)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]On their way to join them and isolate the japanese islands from the rest of the Empire, the Americans have recently completed the liberation of the islands of Guam and Saipan in the Marianas...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif](Monty looking at the camera looking smug, gurkhas moving through rice paddies, british carrier battlegroups moving through the straits of Malacca)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]... the british offensive against the key city of Singapore continues. At the beginning of the month, Royal Marines landed and captured Selangor in Western Malaya... by all measures, the bulk of japanese forces in Southern Asia is retreating into the fortress of Singapore, where allied air, naval and material superiority will make short order of them...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif](flamethrowers, a entire city block collapsing after a bombardment, american soldiers taking refuge behind rubble, SS prisoners paraded in front of the camera, smiling belgian civilians being fed at a campaign kitchen)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...the battle for the city and port of Antwerp, the last stumbling block behing the final assault on the heart of Germany rages on. The enemy's resistance is spirited, but useless. Soon the city will be ready for the shipment of supplies straight into Germany...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif](congressmen debating on the provisional Congress at El Escorial, working brigades building roads under a scorching sun, Negrín and Lister uneasily shaking hands, Negrin departing with Eden and De Gaulle in front of a still ruined Arc de Triomphe)[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...reconstruction efforts continue steady throughout the Motherland one year after the Liberation. While much remains to be done, the joint effort of the spanish people continues to improve the situation of the Republic toward a better future. New factories are built by the same workers that now own them. The older palaces of the burgeoisie are now community clubs for the workers...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]From: Empire’s last Hurrah. The war in Southeastern Asia, 1942-1945. Joseph Billings, Oxford University Press, 1984.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...while australian forces landed in southern Java, the island dissolved in chaos as indonesian collaborators suddenly found themselves headless. While a substantial amount of indonesian forces would fight next to the japanese, they were too badly trained and armed to make a substantial difference. It took the australian force (with portuguese and dutch complements) less than a month to cut short japanese resistance in the field, and only a couple of weeks to clean Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung from the fanatical defenders. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...however, the invasion of Java was in the end a costly diversion: with oil, coal and metals being located mostly in the eastern half of the East Indies, Java and Sumatra provided little more than forced workers to the Japanese. The hopes that the japanese fleet would be forced to leave Singapore to threaten the australians were also unfounded. The australians reached the outskirts of Jakarta the same day indian forward units came into sight of Singapore Island: there was little they could have done to shorten the siege of the city. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]From “Symphony of Titans: the Eastern Front, 1942-1944”, by Eugene E. Richards, 1998. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...It is common to assume that the stop in major offensive operations during the spring of 1944 was due to the rasputitsa that prevented major troop movements and slowed attacking forces, stripping them from their momentum so necessary in soviet war doctrine. However, Stavka had to admit that the battle for Kiev had been harder than predicted and that soviet losses were completely unacceptable. It attests to the scale of the 1942 debacle that the gigantic losses of those months were still affecting soviet strategy when the germans were already well on their way to final defeat. This time, Stalin, soothed by the allied stagnation in front of Antwerp and the Siegfried Line, allowed a delay to better prepare what would be the final offensive...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...Germany, on the other hand, completely neglected this few weeks of breathing space. Despite -or maybe due to- the dwindling resources devoted to the foolishness of the Wotan Line, the Heer finding itself more and more marginalized and SS reinforcements heading west, Himmler refused to do any more preparations for the offensive he knew would come....[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...the german retreat from Estonia and the northern half of Latvia had left Finland in a very difficult situation. The finnish never came close to threaten Leningrad from the north -and would have been unable to invest the city on their own- and soon realized that, on the offensive, they were in a similar predicament to what the soviets had been in 1939. Realizing that Germany could no longer support them, the finnish signed an armistice in April 12 that returned the borders to what they had been in June 1942. This may seem surprisingly lenient, since the Red Army could have crushed the Finns in months, but Stalin was realizing that he would have to go for the kill if he wanted to reach Berlin before the Western Allies, and Finland offered too little reward for the effort. Since then, Finland has been a peaceful, neutralized and trusted trading partner of the Soviet Union, allowed to keep much of its independence but always careful to never incur the wrath of its much more powerful neighbor...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]From My War: reminiscences of the Great Independence War, by Enríque Líster, Ed. Espasa, Madrid, 1969[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]..we entered Sedan for the second time exactly four years after we had entered it the first, an April 25. And what four years! The german garrison had resisted our advances for one month after the fall of Reims at the end of winter, but they finally had to give way, retreating toward the Sigfried Line before the canadians could encircle them from the north. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...while I will not say I am a man prone to philosophies, I could not help but reminisce once our troops liberated the city and I set up headquarters in the same place I had in 1940. Seeing the the rubble of the recent battles mingled with the remains of the older combats made me think a lot. In 1940, we were a small force, badly trained and badly geared. I fondly remembered the now obsolete B1 Toro tanks that had helped us blunt the german attempts to cross the river, and how clunky they seemed in comparison with the sleek Shermans and Prims we sported now. I visited the places that had seen the harshest combats in the now long gone days of that spring four years ago and remembered everything that had gone away: the celebrations after the germans finally gave up on crossing the Meuse, the panic after they broke through that summer, the long retreat toward Spain, and most of all, the futile attempts to stop the enemy in Catalonia, the terrible defeat of 1941, the occupation of the Motherland and the bitter battle to liberate it the year before. In my personal life, I had gone from rising star in the national army to one of the Republic's main military minds, to a disgraced man after my political affiliations became suspect. But now that the commission had cleared me, I stood exactly in the same place I had four years before. And this time, I would not be content with defending my position. This time, my army was in a position to advance...[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]...the realization dawned on me a few days after the liberation of Sedan had been complete: barring me and part of my staff, how many of those who had fought here in 1940 had managed to return? Very few, I found. A few of the 1940 veterans were still in the army but scattered throughout Europe, America and even Asia, many were back at home, either resting or having become unfit for combat, but a very large proportion was not anymore, fallen in countless battlefields scattered from Sedan to Gibraltar. Many of those who were currently fighting on the frontline had been little more than children in 1940. A few had joined the army when the nazis invaded, but there were many that had lived through the Occupation. I was not even 40 years old, but in a way, those new soldiers yearning to invade Germany and finish the war once and for all were striking me as a different generation, as products of a different Spain... [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]"...military historians use the term break, as in "we broke through the Siegfried Line." A more accurate way of expressing what actually happened would be that we punched through it, directly into Germany's trachea." -Claude Auchinleck. [/FONT]
