Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
- Thread starter carlton_bach
- Start date
apologies to everyone i've derailed the thread talking about wahhabism trying to stay on track in the modern day whos a nuclear power ottomans better be one.
You tease.
Although it might not be much of a story, there's still clearly a story here, so; I'm asking.
I think this a good point, the Saudi oil field is dominated by Shia, while Hejaz is dominated by more standard Sunni. So Wahhabism doesn’t get the influence it have. But the question is what replace its influence. The Ottomans of course have a interest in pushing some doctrine which create as few as possible conflicts. At the same time with Persia not having to worry about domestic problems and large Shia population in oil producing regions of the Ottoman Empire, Persia may fund confrontational Shia Islamism and UK with strong influence in Persia and a interest in destabilize the Ottomans may back them, pretty much a counter to how USA help pushing Sunni Islamism in OTL as a counter to USSR and Arab Nationalism.
That mean that the Ottomans need to push some kind of doctrine which embrace all versions of Islam and not alienate non-Muslims.
BTW: I can’t remember what have happened in the Ottoman Balkans in TTL?
Just the germ of one. The Hohenzollern family is an interesting and difficult one, and I am almost certain there will be rebels and misfits in it. And the late 20th/early 21st century with massive social change will produce its share of them. Sionce the members are all supposed to be involved in the state at some level, the women must somehow fit in, which will not be easy or friction-free.
I envision a princess of the house - not in the direct line of succession, obviously, even once the House Law gets changed - joining the army, qualifying for airborne training and going on to join a special operations unit (not the ultra-secretive semi-deniable ones that do dirty ops, the regular, public-eye kind that ghet TV interviews and perform at military shows). It'll be a media circus of some proportion, and of course she's buff and tight and VERY sexy in her regulation gym clothes. It is entirely unbecoming and the public will lap it up.
They don't have the mystique they got in WWII, but they will exist. It's just the obvious thing to do.
Ah. So interesting, but not implausible.
This made me chuckle.
Hmm. I figure for the heavy design OTL Swiss M18 would be a good parrell.
maybe a updated version looking like the Swiss m42, especially into the 50s with camo.
And Weimar/Reichswehr style I think is good, simple, straight to the point, but still very “German.” Good write up
Tyringham Mass, 02 January 2021 [post canon]
Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God.
RIP Sir Brian Urquhart, age 101.
Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God.
RIP Sir Brian Urquhart, age 101.
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Oh dear, hadn't heard.
Rest in peace and thank you for your service, Sir Brian. It's a little disappointing to see nearly all of his obituaries effectively skip over his wartime service - service which was quite substantial.
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National Brandenburg Central, Der Weg nach Walhalla episode 4: "Nullpunkt", Dr Todt speaking, 9 July 1965 [post canon]
The success of the A1 had been a motif in English Fantastic Fiction since the start of the century--die Kanonenmethode der Uranverein assured us would work. It merely required faith and five percent of the national budget. Um im Bilde zu bleiben, very much like the other moon shot Dr von Braun is currently advocating [laughter].
Now it has been said that we chose the A1 target for völkish reasons: to revert the achievements of Peter the Great and permanently evict Russia from the European shores. That is not true. The Zielgruppe which the Emperor had assembled came to their conclusion early on: if it selected an objective intermare, even if the trägersystem were intercepted the spaltstoff would sink into the sea and Mikhael would be none the wiser.
But we had not even reached replication values of 1/1 when Breslau warned Dr Meitner that a comparatively small amount of heavy water would allow unlimited generation of Wilhelmium. Then making bombs would become making sausages.
To quote the Iron Chancellor: the less one knows about sausage-making, the better. Suffice it to say we secured the Norsk Hydro supplies and a commanding majority in their affairs [applause].
The Wilhelmium aggregate itself proved more troublesome. One dubbed it the Schwarzgerät. We had to find a test site.
The success of the A1 had been a motif in English Fantastic Fiction since the start of the century--die Kanonenmethode der Uranverein assured us would work. It merely required faith and five percent of the national budget. Um im Bilde zu bleiben, very much like the other moon shot Dr von Braun is currently advocating [laughter].
Now it has been said that we chose the A1 target for völkish reasons: to revert the achievements of Peter the Great and permanently evict Russia from the European shores. That is not true. The Zielgruppe which the Emperor had assembled came to their conclusion early on: if it selected an objective intermare, even if the trägersystem were intercepted the spaltstoff would sink into the sea and Mikhael would be none the wiser.
But we had not even reached replication values of 1/1 when Breslau warned Dr Meitner that a comparatively small amount of heavy water would allow unlimited generation of Wilhelmium. Then making bombs would become making sausages.
To quote the Iron Chancellor: the less one knows about sausage-making, the better. Suffice it to say we secured the Norsk Hydro supplies and a commanding majority in their affairs [applause].
The Wilhelmium aggregate itself proved more troublesome. One dubbed it the Schwarzgerät. We had to find a test site.
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Been a while...
High Hopes, Bitter Lessons
The Second Russo-German war was the first conflict in which aerorifle troops were deployed in large numbers. This had been theorised since the development of reliable parachutes in the late 1910s , and many European countries were heavily engaged in developing strategic doctrine for both using and countering troops landed from aeroplanes. Initial obstacles, particularly the abiding shortage of transport capacity and the inability to supply units with heavy weapons, were overcome with time. By the early 1930s, both Russia and Germany as well as Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands fielded aerorifles in division strength.
Initial operations using parachute-deployed troops were successful in the context of colonial wars. British Indian forces pioneered the use of interdictive insertion, creating a blocking force on opposing supply lines, in the Third Malakand and Swat campaign of 1934/5. Smaller drops were also used against tribal rebels in Nagaland and in the Sudanese insurgency. The French used their 'bats para' in longer ranged operations in North Africa, airdropping automobiles, motorcycles, and mules along with mountain artillery and heavy mortars. Yet neither they nor the Italians in Libya and Somalia or the Germans in support of their Ottoman and Chinese allies ever deployed large units by air.
War plans of the 1930s and early 1940s envisioned the use of aerorifle troops in large operations to cut enemy supply lines and communication, enabling a breakthrough thrust to penetrate deep into the hinterland. This had been successfully done on the Northwest Frontier, but a European war would require repeating it on an entirely different scale. Russian planners envisioned the large-scale use of gliders, some able to carry armoured fighting vehicles, to insert entire regiments in a single sortie. The German general staff was hesitant to use unpowered flight on this scale and experimented with large transport aeroplanes instead.
In the end, both sides used their aerorifle troops early in the war, to poor effect. The Königlich Bayrisches Fallschirmjägerregiment No. 1 bled to death in a misguided attempt to disrupt supply lines on the southern Russian advance in October of 1944. the first Russian advance on the Lithuanian front, securing railway installations in advance of their armoured spearheads, was counted a strategic success, but involved casualties on a scale to make even STAVKA blanch. The attempt to overwhelm the fortress of Lida by surprise attack on November 2 was a costly failure that saw shocked Lithuanian and German reservist regiments capture the scattered remnants of the proud Guards Aerorifle Division over the course of four days of confused small engagements. Two regiments of Prussian aerorifles as well as the Luftmacht's own Fallschirmsonderregiment, ready for combat drops, were flown to airstrips in the Pripyet salient in early November of 1944 and used as infantry.
The first large-scale German deployment of the Prussian and Saxon Fallschirmtruppen in April of 1944 targeted the Russian rear around Kovel in support of a ground attack. The landing was beset with difficulties, the troops proved unable to set up contingent defensive perimeters, radio communication often failed, and resupply drops were frequently intercepted by Russian forces. Though they succeeded in overwhelming the defenses of several Russian units in the area, the weakness of the aerorifle concept in holding territory against a concerted counterstrike became only too evident. In the end, all further scheduled large-scale drops were cancelled and the remaining troops reserved for special operations. Generaloberst Beck, an early doubter of the concept, was quoted by the postwar press with the adage that it was “a good way of quickly distributing infantry in numbers too small to do any good, but large enough to be painful to lose.”
Two further Russian drops coordinated with attempts to stabilise the northern front in the Baranovichi offensive ended in defeat, one failing in the face of German air defenses, the other unable to link up with ground forces as the attack stalled. No further aerorifle operations were attempted by STAVKA after this. It was left to the Swedish and Finnish armies to demonstrate the value of parachute troops in supporting naval landings and operations in geographically challenging terrain.
Armand Herriman: Drop Zone! The Aerorifle Story, Adventure Books 1988
High Hopes, Bitter Lessons
The Second Russo-German war was the first conflict in which aerorifle troops were deployed in large numbers. This had been theorised since the development of reliable parachutes in the late 1910s , and many European countries were heavily engaged in developing strategic doctrine for both using and countering troops landed from aeroplanes. Initial obstacles, particularly the abiding shortage of transport capacity and the inability to supply units with heavy weapons, were overcome with time. By the early 1930s, both Russia and Germany as well as Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands fielded aerorifles in division strength.
Initial operations using parachute-deployed troops were successful in the context of colonial wars. British Indian forces pioneered the use of interdictive insertion, creating a blocking force on opposing supply lines, in the Third Malakand and Swat campaign of 1934/5. Smaller drops were also used against tribal rebels in Nagaland and in the Sudanese insurgency. The French used their 'bats para' in longer ranged operations in North Africa, airdropping automobiles, motorcycles, and mules along with mountain artillery and heavy mortars. Yet neither they nor the Italians in Libya and Somalia or the Germans in support of their Ottoman and Chinese allies ever deployed large units by air.
War plans of the 1930s and early 1940s envisioned the use of aerorifle troops in large operations to cut enemy supply lines and communication, enabling a breakthrough thrust to penetrate deep into the hinterland. This had been successfully done on the Northwest Frontier, but a European war would require repeating it on an entirely different scale. Russian planners envisioned the large-scale use of gliders, some able to carry armoured fighting vehicles, to insert entire regiments in a single sortie. The German general staff was hesitant to use unpowered flight on this scale and experimented with large transport aeroplanes instead.
In the end, both sides used their aerorifle troops early in the war, to poor effect. The Königlich Bayrisches Fallschirmjägerregiment No. 1 bled to death in a misguided attempt to disrupt supply lines on the southern Russian advance in October of 1944. the first Russian advance on the Lithuanian front, securing railway installations in advance of their armoured spearheads, was counted a strategic success, but involved casualties on a scale to make even STAVKA blanch. The attempt to overwhelm the fortress of Lida by surprise attack on November 2 was a costly failure that saw shocked Lithuanian and German reservist regiments capture the scattered remnants of the proud Guards Aerorifle Division over the course of four days of confused small engagements. Two regiments of Prussian aerorifles as well as the Luftmacht's own Fallschirmsonderregiment, ready for combat drops, were flown to airstrips in the Pripyet salient in early November of 1944 and used as infantry.
The first large-scale German deployment of the Prussian and Saxon Fallschirmtruppen in April of 1944 targeted the Russian rear around Kovel in support of a ground attack. The landing was beset with difficulties, the troops proved unable to set up contingent defensive perimeters, radio communication often failed, and resupply drops were frequently intercepted by Russian forces. Though they succeeded in overwhelming the defenses of several Russian units in the area, the weakness of the aerorifle concept in holding territory against a concerted counterstrike became only too evident. In the end, all further scheduled large-scale drops were cancelled and the remaining troops reserved for special operations. Generaloberst Beck, an early doubter of the concept, was quoted by the postwar press with the adage that it was “a good way of quickly distributing infantry in numbers too small to do any good, but large enough to be painful to lose.”
Two further Russian drops coordinated with attempts to stabilise the northern front in the Baranovichi offensive ended in defeat, one failing in the face of German air defenses, the other unable to link up with ground forces as the attack stalled. No further aerorifle operations were attempted by STAVKA after this. It was left to the Swedish and Finnish armies to demonstrate the value of parachute troops in supporting naval landings and operations in geographically challenging terrain.
Armand Herriman: Drop Zone! The Aerorifle Story, Adventure Books 1988
Oh, dear. It's nice to see that TTL is getting some strategic whiffs, too. I bet a lot of that doctrine was based on colonial engagements, wasn't it - the clever folks ended up with something like a primitive Fireforce, the rest have invented a new way to get excitingly lost in the desert or mountains, and neither one scales up to something victorious in an all-out war between peers.
Paras in the Khyber Pass? A second Great Game between Britain and Integralist Russia? I smell a story.
This is plausible to me (both that the Russians would have a trajectory similar to the OTL Soviet airborne doctrine and that Germany would focus on powered transports), but I think one of the elements missing here is any discussion of dive bombing; not a 1:1 substitute for proper artillery support, but one way to get a little of it.
Ah, so somebody did get it right.
The context is mid-century confidence in technology. "The bomber will always get through". Basically military planners will assume any new technology will work, and any defense not based on a novel technology will fail. And yes, this overlooks the real usefulness of the arm in favour of solving the biggest problem of their age once again.
Not much of one. There is always something happening in the Northwest Frontier Province, and by the 1930s, British India is engaging ion some seriously massive pacification efforts. Russia is in on it, of course, but not seriously. They know they can't take India.
Dive bombing isn't such a big deal. It looks like a waste of planes from the German POV (they believe in targeted altitude bombing, blithely assuming they will hit stuff) and the Russians focus on low-flying attack planes. Both rely on air support to their airborne missions, but neither can manage it in the first year of the war. The Germans because they lack the capacity to hit small ground targets reliably, and the Russians because they can't get radio communication to work on a large scale. And anything that is close enough to hit with frontal aviation is close enough to target directly.
Everybody will eventually get it to work, it just won't do what they expected it to.
The most important thing about getting a kick in the arse is that it makes you think. It got us to question our assumptions really fast. See, before the war, we all felt the world had somehow become small. It looked natural. You could send a telegram anywhere within a day. We had shipping news from Buenos Aires and Tsingtau on the hour, you could take the express mail steamer to New York in under a week, or fly, if you had that kind of money, in two days. People invested in the exchanges of Chicago and Calcutta by telegraph, and the evening paper had the latest wool prices from Sydney and copper from Santiago. The radio had concerts from New York and you could even place a phone call there. It felt as though we were all somehow neighbours.
When the balloon went up, we quickly found out how wrong we all were about that. The Atlantic is big. Even the tiny corner of it that we were supposed to patrol is vast. We thought we had all the advantages, allied coasts at our back, and the Russians did not keep Muurman for long. It was hard to see how they would ever be a problem. We were so stupid. The first time they sortied their cruisers from Muurman, back when they still held it, we missed them completely. You'd think that would make us look like right idiots, but have you ever looked for a ship in the Denmark Straits? I can tell you it's not as easy as it looks. That place only seems small if you look at it on the map. And it wasn't even winter yet.
So, yes, we felt like bumbling fools, fumbling in the fog and occasionally finding an enemy ship, it was like stubbing your toe on furniture at night. Sure we had all the plans in the world, and all the ships we could want. The Finns sent out half their destroyers and the Swedes their corvettes, and after the Alands, we even got battleships, fat lot of good they did us. The Russians only had heavy cruisers and destroyers and a bunch of submersibles, and man did those suck. The Palladas were bad, they could lead you on a wild goose chase for a month and just slip back into harbour at the end of it, and when Kulikovo broke into the Atlantic, it took us and the Dutch three months to get her. But you could see them. They were enemies you could fight on clear terms. Even Pallada couldn't stand up to our heavy cruisers, ton for ton. Submersibles were nasty. You could have all the hydrophones and balloon observers you wanted, some would sneak up on you and put a torpedo up you at dinnertime. I don't think the Russians ever let on who it was that bagged Mackensen and Mecklenburg, but that was a quiet day in the wardroom, I can tell you.
We won. Of course we did. But the thing I'm trying to say it it never got better. Even when the Luftmacht came up with their Funkortung on Zeppelins and we had planes spotting submersibles for us, it was never an easy day. You can put every piece of gear on a ship, you can give a sailor night sights and radio ranging and hydrophonic gear, but you can't shrink the ocean.
Interview with Wilhelm Albrecht Petersen, first officer on SMS Claus von Bevern, for the Reichsrundfunk 1964.
When the balloon went up, we quickly found out how wrong we all were about that. The Atlantic is big. Even the tiny corner of it that we were supposed to patrol is vast. We thought we had all the advantages, allied coasts at our back, and the Russians did not keep Muurman for long. It was hard to see how they would ever be a problem. We were so stupid. The first time they sortied their cruisers from Muurman, back when they still held it, we missed them completely. You'd think that would make us look like right idiots, but have you ever looked for a ship in the Denmark Straits? I can tell you it's not as easy as it looks. That place only seems small if you look at it on the map. And it wasn't even winter yet.
So, yes, we felt like bumbling fools, fumbling in the fog and occasionally finding an enemy ship, it was like stubbing your toe on furniture at night. Sure we had all the plans in the world, and all the ships we could want. The Finns sent out half their destroyers and the Swedes their corvettes, and after the Alands, we even got battleships, fat lot of good they did us. The Russians only had heavy cruisers and destroyers and a bunch of submersibles, and man did those suck. The Palladas were bad, they could lead you on a wild goose chase for a month and just slip back into harbour at the end of it, and when Kulikovo broke into the Atlantic, it took us and the Dutch three months to get her. But you could see them. They were enemies you could fight on clear terms. Even Pallada couldn't stand up to our heavy cruisers, ton for ton. Submersibles were nasty. You could have all the hydrophones and balloon observers you wanted, some would sneak up on you and put a torpedo up you at dinnertime. I don't think the Russians ever let on who it was that bagged Mackensen and Mecklenburg, but that was a quiet day in the wardroom, I can tell you.
We won. Of course we did. But the thing I'm trying to say it it never got better. Even when the Luftmacht came up with their Funkortung on Zeppelins and we had planes spotting submersibles for us, it was never an easy day. You can put every piece of gear on a ship, you can give a sailor night sights and radio ranging and hydrophonic gear, but you can't shrink the ocean.
Interview with Wilhelm Albrecht Petersen, first officer on SMS Claus von Bevern, for the Reichsrundfunk 1964.
Deleted member 94708
There's some irony in the Germans fighting the other side of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to lack the overwhelming material superiority that allowed the British and Americans to turn the North Atlantic into an Allied lake IOTL.
They've arrived at some or most of the same innovations; better hydrophones, radar, long-endurance aerial surveillance... but they just don't have the huge advantage in industrial capacity to put them all to use at the insane scale that the US industrial plant did, and they aren't simultaneously gutting the Russians' entire supply chain for submarine production in the way the Allies did in '43 and '44.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to lack the overwhelming material superiority that allowed the British and Americans to turn the North Atlantic into an Allied lake IOTL.
They've arrived at some or most of the same innovations; better hydrophones, radar, long-endurance aerial surveillance... but they just don't have the huge advantage in industrial capacity to put them all to use at the insane scale that the US industrial plant did, and they aren't simultaneously gutting the Russians' entire supply chain for submarine production in the way the Allies did in '43 and '44.