Kraznaya
Princeps
otl lol
Alternate History Thread V
- Thread starter Dachs
- Start date
otl lol
Eh? You can't read any book on the First World War without seeing stuff about the French 'spirit of the offensive' in it. I took the opportunity to use fake history to enlighten people about real history. (I did that with a lot of things. I'm pretty sure this TL will break the record, if one exists, for "conscious allusions to OTL".)
Mostly the OTL Constitutionalist rebellion, with a twist: Russian-occupied northern Iran became a haven for the Qajar shah (in OTL, the Russians went along with the Constitutionalists due to their joint protectorate over Iran with the British per the 1907 entente). So, in circumstances remarkably similar to the situation in China, Anglo-Russian opposition has spawned a north-south civil war with Russian-backed imperials in the north and British-backed republicans in the south.Yui108 said:
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Impressive, overall, the actions (if any) of the IJN seem to be a bit neglected, especially in 1916. Namely, the Yellow Sea is theirs, but they don't seem to be doing much with it. I don't think it was ever truly clarified in the TL writing that Italy was officially fighting on the side of the Entente. Though I guess this is obvious, it's still slightly confusing.
Afghanistan was damn ineffectual; you'd think with Russia so concerned about Islamist rebels, Afghanistan might serve as a decent springboard for some Central Asian Islamist guerilla warfare against the Tsarists.
Not that the British would have been smart enough to harness such a force, just seems like something that might have happened naturally. And even the Brits would be smart enough to get the Uighurs restive in Sinkiang to serve as a distraction for Russia.
Oh yeah, and I agree with Lucky about the Russian color change. Too many blues on the dance floor. >_<
Afghanistan was damn ineffectual; you'd think with Russia so concerned about Islamist rebels, Afghanistan might serve as a decent springboard for some Central Asian Islamist guerilla warfare against the Tsarists.
Not that the British would have been smart enough to harness such a force, just seems like something that might have happened naturally. And even the Brits would be smart enough to get the Uighurs restive in Sinkiang to serve as a distraction for Russia.
Oh yeah, and I agree with Lucky about the Russian color change. Too many blues on the dance floor. >_<
Kraznaya
Princeps
Kraznaya
Princeps
green doesn't seem to be a particularly tsarist color
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
I know this, it's just that Italy wasn't mentioned in the declarations of war or anything. Their 'betraying' the Triple Alliance in OTL was a big deal, I thought it deserved a cursory note.
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
Green is a perfectly fine Tsarist color, though gold or brown also work.
Spoiler :
The contrast just looks so much better, and if you think it doesn't your eyes are broken. :[
What, precisely, did you expect them to do with it, other than ferry troops and supplies to China and Korea? As it was, the Shandong invasion was rather risky and involved a significant diversion of force away from Manchuria. (Hence why the Aussies and Kiwis have mostly taken over there.) It's not as though the Russians are going to seriously come out and challenge the Japanese, and it's not as though close blockade will be even remotely meaningful. The war in the Yellow Sea and the Bo Hai is mostly a mine-heavy dead zone. The Japanese are more than happy to not have to deal with a threat to their supply lines, and the Russians are more than happy to keep their fleet. (Such as it is.)
For their part, the Afghans - specifically, emir Habibullah - are utterly uninterested in turning their state into a modern-era battlefield. Habibullah has already extracted the concessions he wanted out of the British - limited involvement and a seat at the eventual peace conference table - and is now chiefly concerned with the same game he was playing before the war broke out, namely keeping the balance between Russia and the British. And since the Russians are unwilling to devote the kind of force to Afghanistan that would permit them to overwhelm the Indian Army detachments there (the ones that replaced the BEF in the winter of 1915-6), northern Afghanistan will remain a low-intensity area.Thlayli said:
The British are of course incredibly uninterested in a call to Islamic holy war against the Russians because of the potential consequences for British Egypt and India. The India Office guys who have to deal with the AIML nearly shat themselves when Enver suggested getting the Sultan to declare a holy war in 1915. The French, who are enjoying one of those rare moments when the French and Algerians in North Africa find some common ground, are even less willing to risk it.
Furthermore, the Russians are well aware of the issues of keeping order in their rear areas. I alluded to it in the Caucasus section, but the combination of the needs of internal security and their own logistical incapacity to keep a large number of men fighting on the edges of their empire means that the Russians have devoted over half of their mobilized forces to internal security missions. Hence any noises from Uighurs, Basmachis, Georgians and the like have been quite rapidly stifled.
No thanks, and thanks, in that order.I would personally recolour all the countries on that map to be honest.
Oh, and, uh, good story.
I'm a bit surprised you haven't commented on the Ottomans and China in more detail, actually.In the original version of the TL, I believe Russia was green, actually. I'll edit the maps to reflect this, since there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of enthusiasm for the blue.
It actually, um, wasn't that big of a deal in OTL. Despite the fact that Italo-German war planning was actually more intimate than was Austro-German war planning (one of the weirdest subplots of prewar diplomacy), neither the Germans nor the Austrians expected the Italians to actually go to war on their side. The most that was hoped from the Triple Alliance was that Italy would cease to go to blows with Austria. As Bismarck correctly realized, Austria-Hungary was not suited for a long war, and if Austria-Hungary ceased to exist, there would be revolutionary consequences in Central Europe and the Balkans that he wouldn't want to have to deal with. And while, in 1882, Italy had the prospect of joining a war against France because of Italo-French colonial squabbling and Vittorio Emanuele II's near-rabid willingness to fight anybody and everybody, the addition of Britain to the scales of the Entente and the erasure of Italo-French difficulties over North Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century pretty much obviated any real desire to fight France on the part of the Italian government. The army, being officered in significant part by Savoyards and in any course somewhat insulated from diplomatic affairs, was a bit slower to catch on.
At any rate, the Italians are doing precisely what the Germans want them to at the moment.
Kraznaya
Princeps
it looks like you just dumped a lot of sewage on the map
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
Classic brown would look better?
The map had too much blue and there is little reason to defend it beyond this point. Also, going no caps doesn't make you look cool. The Climax of the Eurasian War.
By 1917, with scant hope of decisive victory in Western Europe or China, the Western Entente powers had turned to other potential theaters to provide the breakthrough against the Three Emperors League. Austria-Hungary was the weakest of the German-allied states, both externally its military was arguably weaker than Bulgarias and internally several observers expected it to break up on internal lines soon. Surely, given the correct allies, many of whom the Entente powers already had lined up, and juuuuuust the right amount of pressure, the Habsburg monarchy would fold, with revolutionary consequences for Central Europe.
The most important potential ally against the Austrians was Italy, and indeed Italy had been an informal Anglo-French ally against Austria since 1907s so-called Fourth Mediterranean Agreement. Despite fighting colonial wars in Ethiopia and Libya, the Italians available manpower was growing. The Libyan war was winding down (and would do so even faster with British aid against the Senussi) and the Italians were doing badly enough in the Ethiopian war that they had already started bringing troops back home. For the government of Luigi Luzzatti, recently having displaced the evergreen Giovanni Giolitti at the head of the Italian Liberals, war against Austria offered a potential economic and prestige lifeline, while permitting Luzzatti to get out of Giolittis considerable shadow and maybe even take his place in the sun in Italian politics for real. Thus when the Entente offers began to arrive in the fall of 1916 for Italian annexations all along the Adriatic coast (these were so lurid as to be scarcely believable: Dalmatia to be annexed, along with Trieste and Istria, with puppet Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia added to the mix), the Luzzatti government was extremely receptive.
Enver, of course, had already dragged the Ottoman Empire, another prerequisite for any Balkan war, into cobelligerence with the Entente. With the grand invasion of the Caucasus coming off as a damp squib, Enver, who has been retroactively diagnosed by some psychologists with a form of ADHD, was fixing on a new opportunity. Formerly-Turkish Western Thrace, which had belonged to Bulgaria since the First Balkan War, particularly appealed to him. Bulgaria itself was one of the Habsburg Empires main props, having agreed to join a Balkan League with Austria and puppet Serbia in 1914 to neutralize the southern Balkans. Destroying Bulgaria was a necessary prerequisite for the destruction of Austria-Hungary; conveniently enough, Bulgaria also made a handy prize for would-be members of the Entente-allied Balkan coalition to divvy up. In Romania, one of the last barriers to cooperation with the Entente, King Carol (who, as a Hohenzollern, was almost monomaniacally devoted to Franz Ferdinand and Wilhelm), had died in 1915. His son Ferdinands government was much more receptive to Entente offers of Transylvania, despite Romanias alliances with Austria-Hungary and Germany. Greece was the hardest nut to crack, as it was in the middle of an increasingly acrimonious dispute between the popular prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos and the pro-German militaristic King Konstantinos. But Bulgarian power played its part in frightening Konstantinos into, reluctantly, patching up his differences with Venizelos and with the Unspeakable Turk to join up with the Entente. Avarice, of course, played a role as well, and Bulgarian Macedonia was extremely inviting...
This Entente-allied Balkan alliance was semi-quietly assembled during the course of February 1917 by one of Greys troubleshooters, Harold Nicolson, and readied for a May campaign against Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. Almost immediately, though, things began to tilt even more dramatically in the Ententes favor. For in March 1917, Kaiser und König Franz Ferdinands squabbles with the Hungarian diet finally turned violent.
The Ausgleich (literally compromise) of 1867 that had reformed the Austrian Empire into a personal union of Austria and Hungary had rarely, if ever, been happy for either party. Habsburg statesmen fumed that there was no possibility of a unified policy affecting anything but the military, which was the sole common institution and the Magyars always dragged their feet in implementing any of the army laws passed in Austria. By 1917, Austria itself i.e. the parts of the Empire outside the Kingdom of Hungary had been transformed: to the always-thriving culture of Vienna and Prague was added a burgeoning industrial economy, an advanced education system, and a political system that, although riddled with conflict and tensions, respected civil rights and included many democratic features. Not only did most of these things not apply to Hungary, they impeded Austria-Hungarys efforts to conduct a strong foreign policy. Arguably, the reason Austria was able to retain the trappings of a Great Power a small sphere of influence in the northern Balkans was that it faced almost no competition. When, in the case of Bulgaria, it had had to deal with the opposition of Russian diplomats, it took until 1914 for the Austrians and Russians (nominally allies!) to hammer out a deal that permitted the Austrians to ally with Sofia.
Austrias lack of a strong foreign policy, more than anything else, was the corollary of its lack of a strong army. Between 1890 and 1913, the size of the Austrian military did not change at all (due, of course, to Magyar intransigence); by 1910 the Habsburgs were training 0.23 percent of their population, compared with 0.39 percent in Germany and 0.81 percent in France. Since the Magyars also refused to increase the budget for the common army, the small size was not accompanied by an increase in relative army quality, as in Germany. The net result was that Austria only had the manpower to fight a Balkan war, and arguably only against one opponent. Serbias demise as an independent power in 1913 had in large part been the work of the Bulgarians, and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrias fiery chief of the general staff, had worried about the ability of the army to even advance beyond Belgrade without losing cohesion. Furthermore, the Second Balkan War, while eliminating a major security threat to the Empire, had only decreased the Hungarian diets willingness to vote funds for military expansion. Even though Conrad warned of Romanian and Italian treachery the Romanians in particular being a potential scare for Budapest blithe insouciance meant that by 1917 Conrad had to make do with the exact same fiscal resources his predecessor, Friedrich Beck, had had in 1889.
Franz Ferdinand, who ascended the throne in 1915, had never had the patience for the Magyars that his uncle, Franz Josef, had had. While Archduke and heir apparent, he had flirted with several schemes for the reform of the Empire, including a potential federal system, a triple monarchy, and the centralized absolutism of the 1850s to which the German liberals longed to return. In 1905, he had thought Trialism dead, when the Croats had tendered the Fiume Resolution and chosen to work for autonomy within the Hungarian framework. But over the years that began to change. First the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and then the Second Balkan War and the transformation of Serbia into an ostensibly docile puppet state gave him an opportunity, while prompting even more Hungarian obstinacy over budgetary questions and Magyarization. And the Croats themselves began to change their minds during Max von Becks tenure as head of the Austrian civilian government, which saw even more reform bills put into place while the Magyars continued to drag their feet. By the time the Ausgleich came up for its decennial renegotiation in the late winter of 1917, Franz Ferdinands views on Trialism had changed: at the negotiations, he personally put forward a plan to annex Serbia and make it the core of a third kingdom to add to the personal union, which would embrace Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina as well.
Its not clear that this plan would have prevented the problems with Austro-Hungarian deadlock (it may, indeed, have increased them, and would not have done anything to fix the national identity problems in Romania or Galicia). The proposal did, however, make Franz Ferdinands murderous intentions with regards to Dualism rather clear to the Hungarian diet. Magyars had gotten an outrageously good deal under the Ausgleich; they were free to oppress Croats, Serbs, and Romanians as they desired, could use grain to hold Austrian companies hostage for railroad money, and didnt have to deal with any of those troublesome modernizing things that were all the rage further west. Tisza István, the Hungarian prime minister, rejected the terms, and proposed the status quo, a proposal that probably wouldve been acceptable to any of Franz Josefs governments but which only made Franz Ferdinand, a man as inflexible as the Magyars, even less willing to compromise. Further negotiations went on, although it was increasingly clear that they were desultory and that the main questions were simply being avoided. Eventually they foundered on Franz Ferdinands minimum demand, the institution of universal manhood suffrage in Hungary, which would, presumably, add enough Croats and Romanians to the Hungarian Diet to break funding deadlocks. On April 28, Tisza formally revoked the Ausgleich and declared himself regent; two days later, the Austrian prime minister Karl von Stürgkh declared that a state of war existed between Austria and Hungary.
Hungary was indeed in an unusually good position to try conclusions with the Austrians. Austria-Hungary had operated with a common regular army, but the reserves were divided by nationality, such that they could hardly be called reserves at all: the Landwehr in Cisleithania and the Honvédség in Transleithania. The Honvéd served as a fine nucleus around which to build a larger conscript army, and it was hardly as though the Magyars lacked recruits. But Hungarys relative lack of industrialization meant that a long war was only dubiously sustainable. If it were merely Austria against Hungary and Tisza knew it would not be, for Wilhelm shared Franz Ferdinands desire to crush the Magyars Austria had a strong chance of winning.
The Ausgleich negotiations had caught the attention of all Austrias neighbors, though. In Belgrade, frustrations with the puppet king, Đurađ Obrenović, peaked with the revelation of Franz Ferdinands annexationist ideas. A group of nationalist army officers led by Colonel Petar ivković, in imitation of the coup of 1903, seized the palace and murdered the royal family on April 21. They called Aleksandar Karađorđević, the pretender to the throne, to come back to Belgrade from exile in London, and made preparations to fight the Austrians. Politics made for strange bedfellows, and the new Serbian regime was more than happy to fight alongside the very Hungarians that were oppressing fellow Serbs just across the Danube in Vojvodina if it meant they could get a crack at the hated Habsburgs. And ivković had not acted alone, but with the connivance of some opportunistic British agents operating not entirely with government sanction but now that he had succeeded, London was more than happy to talk to him and to Tisza.
Thus, in the first few days of May, the Ententes Balkan allies and Italy, of course made various ultimatums to Austria demanding territory, all of which were, of course, nakedly aggressive and imperialistic, and designed to be rejected. Only in Romania did the government suffer a brief bout of confusion, with many ministers extremely unhappy about allying with the Magyars. Nicolson had to convince the British cabinet to formally declare a commitment to getting the Hungarians to revise the boundaries of Transylvania before the Romanians followed through and joined the chorus. In due course, naturally, all of the various ultimatums were rejected, as if Franz Ferdinand could do anything else. Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister, hurriedly issued calls to arms to Berlin, Sofia, and St. Petersburg, while Conrad, his entire army in complete disarray, desperately tried to manage a semblance of a mobilization.
Joffre was quick to realize that the sudden collapse of Austria gave the Entente its best chance it had had for the entire war. Originally, he had expected to manage the Balkan front with the forces on hand from the various allied states there, but with Austria itself apparently on the verge of collapse, he immediately detailed almost the entire French general reserve to entrain to Italy to join the push to the Ljubljana Gap. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Robertson, was slow to go along with this being in favor of renewing the pressure in Belgium but eventually Kitchener, who saw the potential of the Balkan front, convinced him to detach most of Second Army to add to the New Army divisions forming up in southern England to create a Fourth Army to sent to Thessaloniki. (Fisher, predictably, argued for an amphibious invasion, this time of Austrian Dalmatia. He was overwhelmingly overruled, with several cabinet members noting the difficulty of invading in the teeth of the K.u.K. navy, especially in light of the losses suffered off Borkum, Robertson reminding everyone of the loss of most of the Royal Marines, and Maurice Hankey commenting that the Dalmatian coast had few communications with the interior and thus any force landing there would be unable to exploit a victory.)
With the Habsburg armies having virtually ceased to exist, the Italians made easy progress to Trieste and Trent, and began to push into the Tyrol. From there, things got significantly messier, as the Austrians began to put up more resistance, coming chiefly from their legendary jägers, and Italian communications got worse. The invading force had been intelligently leavened by many veterans of the Ethiopian mountain war; less intelligent were its dispositions, the work of the chief of the general staff, Luigi Cadorna, who was not exactly the brightest star in the firmament of Italian military thought (no mean feat). Still, with the addition of Maunourys French troops from late May, the Italians were making reasonable progress up the Gap of Ljubljana, and in the first week of June, a unit of Bersaglieri successfully broke into Innsbruck. At the same time, Szurmay Sándors Honvéds were besieging Eisenstadt and Pressburg, while an extemporized Serbian army under the command of Petar Bojović was busily engaged in massacring Croat militias (and plenty of people who werent in militias, to the general horror of everybody who didnt know how wars were fought in the Balkans). Bulgaria, for its part, had effectively ceased to exist, with Romanians, Greeks, Serbs, and Ottomans overwhelming the pretty-good-but-not-invincible Bulgarian armies of Kliment Boyadzhiev. A shattered Bulgarian remnant managed to pull back to Varna, where Vladimir Vazov directed an energetic defense against the overextended Greek and Turkish troops that besieged the city.
Then things began to unravel. The first hiccup was at Ljubjlana, where Armando Diazs Italians began to move in to occupy the city in strength. On June 11, they ran head-on into a German army, the newly formed Twelfth, one of those intended for Mackensens breakthrough at Verdun but instead detailed to fire brigade duties. Its commander, Alexander von Linsingen, was not a General Staff man, but he was one of Mackensens protégés, and a sound field commander with a bullheaded temperament; moreover, he was assisted by an excellent chief of staff, Hans von Seeckt, who more than covered for many of his commanders intellectual shortcomings. The Italians had hitherto fought disorganized Habsburg troops denuded of Hungarian-born NCOs and officers, but now they were up against the better-trained, -equipped, and led Germans, who were furthermore spared the confusion of a civil war. It was hardly much of a surprise that the Italians wilted and fell back. It was, however, very serious for the rest of the front, as Innsbruck was now uncovered, and its supply lines easy prey for the jägers.
The most serious threat to the Austrians came from the Hungarians. Already in late May several German staff officers had been sent to help provide a backbone for the Austrian defenses around Vienna, to reorganize the units there into a semblance of a field army. The result, by June 20, was a force that was reasonably capable of standing on its own, commanded by Arthur Arz von Straußenburg. It served as the pivot for Mackensens other army, the Twelfth, commanded by Leopold, prince of Bavaria (called out of retirement for ONE. LAST. MISSION.), with Max Hoffmann serving as chief of staff. Twelfth Army had been deployed by rail into Slovakia, where a national defense committee had organized effective resistance to the Hungarians and pledged loyalty to Vienna. With Arz von Straußenbergs troops putting up a lively fight in front of the capital, Hoffmann and Leopold had the luxury of setting things up properly. When the German attack crashed in, the token screen the Hungarians had given to the forces covering Slovakia collapsed, and the Germans pushed on towards Komorn.
Finally, the Russians too sent troops, with Sukhomlinov and the stavka almost overjoyed to a) get the opportunity to recoup their influence in the Balkans and b) finally be able to deploy troops to a theater that wasnt on the other side of the world. The Southwest Front forming up around Odessa basically a reinforced army was given a commander, Radko Dimitriev, who was, in fact, a Bulgarian war hero on loan to Stavka. His appointment was more propaganda coup than intelligent selection, although Sukhomlinov and the velikiy knyaz mitigated the damage by assigning the general staff planner Yuri Danilov as his chief of staff (mostly to get him out of Sukhomlinovs hair). Dimitrievs troops encountered stiff resistance from the Romanians, who had held back most of their army, unwilling to work with the Magyars; they were augmented, from mid-July, by an Ottoman army under the command of Mustafa Kemal, released from the siege of Varna. After the first attacks on Iasi were driven back bloodily, Dimitriev waited a few weeks to link up with Moritz von Auffenbergs Fourth Austrian Army (in reality a motley collection of Polish Landwehr and disorganized regulars) from the Bukovina. The joint attack on Botosani that ensued did not make appreciably more progress than the one on Iasi, and the Russians were forced to disengage with significant losses.
In a meeting between Nikolai Nikolaievich, Conrad, and Mackensen at OHL (which had been moved to Potsdam) on July 14, the League powers managed to convince themselves that the grand invasion of the Balkans was, in fact, an opportunity. Conrad was eager to settle accounts with Italy, and argued that Linsingens army could provide the spearhead for an invasion of the Po valley and, after that, Provence, providing a back door into southern France. More interesting to Nikolai Nikolaievich personally was the opportunity to disembowel the Ottoman Empire. Once Hungary and Serbia were crushed and Bulgaria revived a fairly tall order the road to Tsargrad would be open. The Germans had rather pointedly avoided figuring out what would be done with the Straits before then, and the Russian delegation tried to bring it up again (failing to get a definite answer). Mackensen ultimately threw a damp towel on the proceedings by noting that the situation was still extremely fluid and far from stabilized. Germany had thrown in the strategic reserve, against his better judgment, but the British Fourth Army and the Greek Army had not yet made their appearance, and the French were still barely beginning to file into line in the Tyrol. The opportunity certainly existed for a decisive campaign, but they were far from out of the woods yet.
Mackensens sobriety was a product not merely of the European situation but also that of China. For Jiang, hoping to break the bloody stalemate in eastern China, had finally convinced the Japanese and the Australians to launch an amphibious invasion of Zhili to try a knockout blow against Beijing. With the Royal Navys China Station and the IJN screening Port Arthur, the way into the Bo Hai would be quite clear, and from the coast it was a quick trip to Beijing. Even if the imperial government and Yuan Shikai were not captured, the loss of Beijing, its factories, and railroads would cripple the Beiyang Army and Falkenhayns Chinese expeditionary forces further south.
In the time-honored tradition of western assaults on Beijing, the Entente forces would be focusing on the capture of Tianjin. Formerly, the Dagu forts had controlled the approaches to the city, but after the Boxer rebellion most of these had been dismantled. The Entente troops did have to contend with mines, which had only been in their infancy seventeen years prior and which were effectively the only means the Qing and their European allies had of defending the Bo Hai, with Spees squadron at the bottom of the Atlantic and the Russians cowering in Port Arthur. Still, none of the key planners Robertson, the Japanese general Yui Mitsue, Aylmer Hunter-Weston (the overall commander of the expedition), Alexander Godley, or the Australian William Bridges believed that the resistance at Tianjin would be particularly heavy. Beijing would be by far the toughest nut to crack, but by then they could ship Jiangs troops into Zhili to provide the raw manpower to reach the capital.
It was unfortunate for them that Yuan Shikai was such a paranoid man. In 1915 he had ordered Wang Yitang to form a several-division army in Zhili in case of foreign invasion and to serve as a general reserve for the armies in the south. During Jiangs Spring and Autumn Offensives much of the Army of Zhilis manpower had been siphoned off to stiffen the southern armies, but a hard core remained around Beijing and Tianjin. By 1917, its commander, Wu Peifu, had been carrying on a running bureaucratic battle with Duan Qirui for years, successfully resisting demands to redeploy to shore up the front in Jiangsu, with Duan claiming that Wu was just using his reinforced corps to create a little fiefdom up in Tianjin. Whatever the reason for Wus refusal to leave the area, it came in handy when the ANZACs and Japanese hit the beach near the Dagu forts on June 4, for his troops were fairly close to the action and had already plotted out excellent defensive positions.
Yet Wu lacked the manpower to cover every single landing that the Entente forces were making. While some beaches were covered by machine gun nests one beach in particular, the Australian-assigned Beach O, saw Entente casualties climb to 80% of the original attacking force most were wide open and free. Yet on many of these, the Entente troops failed to advance, some out of insouciance, others from a well-practiced desire to entrench at their landing points. Opportunities to push inland in the face of no opposition were sometimes missed entirely. Furthermore, the Entente troops were bedeviled by communications problems not to mention good old nationalistic suspicion and racism between the Australians and Japanese. All of these delays were vital, for they allowed Wu time to draw in his other divisions from the rest of Zhili. By the morning of June 5, Wus immediate forces available on the beaches had tripled, while the Entente troops were far from their objectives.
Wu was critically short of one key resource, though, artillery. Conversely, with the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy cruising offshore, the Entente forces had that in abundance. Though the subsequent attacks on the remnant of the Dagu forts were bloody, they were, by June 6, successful, and the Japanese in particular began to expand their beachhead around towards the outskirts of Tianjin. With Japanese gunboats supporting the invasion force by moving down the Bei He River, Wus troops were ground down and forced to retreat step by step. On June 12, Godleys ANZACs broke into Tianjin, and began to slog through house-to-house fighting to drive Wus Zhili troops from the port. Here, the Australians gained the distinction of being the first to employ flamethrowers in combat, using them extensively in the rubble of Tianjin to clear out ratholes where Wus soldiers lay in ambush.
The eight days that Wu had bought with the aid of Entente mistakes permitted the redeployment of several Russian army corps from Brusilovs army. Commanded by Lavr Kornilov, another old China hand, the Russians filed into the Qing trenches and launched diversionary attacks on the Japanese at the northern edge of the landing area. The Russians arrival began to tip the numerical balance back in favor of the defenders, but Hunter-Westons attacks were far from exhausted. Unfortunately for the Entente, it was Hunter-Weston who was directing them. Australians were sent forward against the Sino-Russian trench lines in mass attacks to try to outflank the unsporting defenders in Tianjins urban areas to the south and southeast and were killed in droves, having not had the sort of experience storming fortified lines that the British, Japanese, Russians, or Germans (or even the Beiyang Army) had. While the Australian casualties in the villages of Jinghai County were not particularly large compared with those of the regular British troops, much less those of the Japanese, their role in later Australian national consciousness and the memory of Tianjin was extremely large. By late August, Hunter-Weston was preparing to mount one last big push from the area of the old Japanese Concession with a newly arrived division of Republican troops, but this too ran into heavy resistance and bogged down.
In July, with the Tianjin landings stalled, Jiang had prepared for a fresh offensive in Jiangsu, hoping that the defense of Zhili was at least distracting the Qing and drawing off reserves from the Beiyang Armys frontline units. It was, but not enough: Jiangs troops pushed Duans hardened veterans out of Guannan and forced the evacuation of most of the Jiangsu coast, but at outrageously disproportionate casualties. The Beiyang Army was able to construct a fresh and more compact defensive line on the Xinyi River. Although his troops kept advancing, Nanjing saw only long rolls of casualties with no end in sight. Yuan still remained defiant in Beijing. Some of the more militarily astute in Nanjing also believed that Jiangs armies were increasingly overstretched, vulnerable to a Qing counterpunch. After an open debate over his leadership in August, Jiang returned to Nanjing from his field headquarters at Xuchang and successfully defended his position, but open doubts remained, and it was clear that the merest slipup would bring Jiang and the Guomindang to an open confrontation.
Such were the conditions when Mackensen warned of overoptimism in his meeting with Conrad and the velikiy knyaz. Overall, the situation was extremely critical, although opportunities were developing as the Entente forces stretched increasingly thin. The best part about the situation, though, was the fact that unlike the Western Front, which remained a war of positions, or Stellungskrieg, the war in the Balkans and China was a true Bewegungskrieg, the war Germanys soldiers had trained for for forty-five years. Mobile operations held out the prospect of decisive victory, and forced officers to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. Such a war could play to Germanys strengths.
By 1917, with scant hope of decisive victory in Western Europe or China, the Western Entente powers had turned to other potential theaters to provide the breakthrough against the Three Emperors League. Austria-Hungary was the weakest of the German-allied states, both externally its military was arguably weaker than Bulgarias and internally several observers expected it to break up on internal lines soon. Surely, given the correct allies, many of whom the Entente powers already had lined up, and juuuuuust the right amount of pressure, the Habsburg monarchy would fold, with revolutionary consequences for Central Europe.
The most important potential ally against the Austrians was Italy, and indeed Italy had been an informal Anglo-French ally against Austria since 1907s so-called Fourth Mediterranean Agreement. Despite fighting colonial wars in Ethiopia and Libya, the Italians available manpower was growing. The Libyan war was winding down (and would do so even faster with British aid against the Senussi) and the Italians were doing badly enough in the Ethiopian war that they had already started bringing troops back home. For the government of Luigi Luzzatti, recently having displaced the evergreen Giovanni Giolitti at the head of the Italian Liberals, war against Austria offered a potential economic and prestige lifeline, while permitting Luzzatti to get out of Giolittis considerable shadow and maybe even take his place in the sun in Italian politics for real. Thus when the Entente offers began to arrive in the fall of 1916 for Italian annexations all along the Adriatic coast (these were so lurid as to be scarcely believable: Dalmatia to be annexed, along with Trieste and Istria, with puppet Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia added to the mix), the Luzzatti government was extremely receptive.
Enver, of course, had already dragged the Ottoman Empire, another prerequisite for any Balkan war, into cobelligerence with the Entente. With the grand invasion of the Caucasus coming off as a damp squib, Enver, who has been retroactively diagnosed by some psychologists with a form of ADHD, was fixing on a new opportunity. Formerly-Turkish Western Thrace, which had belonged to Bulgaria since the First Balkan War, particularly appealed to him. Bulgaria itself was one of the Habsburg Empires main props, having agreed to join a Balkan League with Austria and puppet Serbia in 1914 to neutralize the southern Balkans. Destroying Bulgaria was a necessary prerequisite for the destruction of Austria-Hungary; conveniently enough, Bulgaria also made a handy prize for would-be members of the Entente-allied Balkan coalition to divvy up. In Romania, one of the last barriers to cooperation with the Entente, King Carol (who, as a Hohenzollern, was almost monomaniacally devoted to Franz Ferdinand and Wilhelm), had died in 1915. His son Ferdinands government was much more receptive to Entente offers of Transylvania, despite Romanias alliances with Austria-Hungary and Germany. Greece was the hardest nut to crack, as it was in the middle of an increasingly acrimonious dispute between the popular prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos and the pro-German militaristic King Konstantinos. But Bulgarian power played its part in frightening Konstantinos into, reluctantly, patching up his differences with Venizelos and with the Unspeakable Turk to join up with the Entente. Avarice, of course, played a role as well, and Bulgarian Macedonia was extremely inviting...
This Entente-allied Balkan alliance was semi-quietly assembled during the course of February 1917 by one of Greys troubleshooters, Harold Nicolson, and readied for a May campaign against Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. Almost immediately, though, things began to tilt even more dramatically in the Ententes favor. For in March 1917, Kaiser und König Franz Ferdinands squabbles with the Hungarian diet finally turned violent.
The Ausgleich (literally compromise) of 1867 that had reformed the Austrian Empire into a personal union of Austria and Hungary had rarely, if ever, been happy for either party. Habsburg statesmen fumed that there was no possibility of a unified policy affecting anything but the military, which was the sole common institution and the Magyars always dragged their feet in implementing any of the army laws passed in Austria. By 1917, Austria itself i.e. the parts of the Empire outside the Kingdom of Hungary had been transformed: to the always-thriving culture of Vienna and Prague was added a burgeoning industrial economy, an advanced education system, and a political system that, although riddled with conflict and tensions, respected civil rights and included many democratic features. Not only did most of these things not apply to Hungary, they impeded Austria-Hungarys efforts to conduct a strong foreign policy. Arguably, the reason Austria was able to retain the trappings of a Great Power a small sphere of influence in the northern Balkans was that it faced almost no competition. When, in the case of Bulgaria, it had had to deal with the opposition of Russian diplomats, it took until 1914 for the Austrians and Russians (nominally allies!) to hammer out a deal that permitted the Austrians to ally with Sofia.
Austrias lack of a strong foreign policy, more than anything else, was the corollary of its lack of a strong army. Between 1890 and 1913, the size of the Austrian military did not change at all (due, of course, to Magyar intransigence); by 1910 the Habsburgs were training 0.23 percent of their population, compared with 0.39 percent in Germany and 0.81 percent in France. Since the Magyars also refused to increase the budget for the common army, the small size was not accompanied by an increase in relative army quality, as in Germany. The net result was that Austria only had the manpower to fight a Balkan war, and arguably only against one opponent. Serbias demise as an independent power in 1913 had in large part been the work of the Bulgarians, and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrias fiery chief of the general staff, had worried about the ability of the army to even advance beyond Belgrade without losing cohesion. Furthermore, the Second Balkan War, while eliminating a major security threat to the Empire, had only decreased the Hungarian diets willingness to vote funds for military expansion. Even though Conrad warned of Romanian and Italian treachery the Romanians in particular being a potential scare for Budapest blithe insouciance meant that by 1917 Conrad had to make do with the exact same fiscal resources his predecessor, Friedrich Beck, had had in 1889.
Franz Ferdinand, who ascended the throne in 1915, had never had the patience for the Magyars that his uncle, Franz Josef, had had. While Archduke and heir apparent, he had flirted with several schemes for the reform of the Empire, including a potential federal system, a triple monarchy, and the centralized absolutism of the 1850s to which the German liberals longed to return. In 1905, he had thought Trialism dead, when the Croats had tendered the Fiume Resolution and chosen to work for autonomy within the Hungarian framework. But over the years that began to change. First the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and then the Second Balkan War and the transformation of Serbia into an ostensibly docile puppet state gave him an opportunity, while prompting even more Hungarian obstinacy over budgetary questions and Magyarization. And the Croats themselves began to change their minds during Max von Becks tenure as head of the Austrian civilian government, which saw even more reform bills put into place while the Magyars continued to drag their feet. By the time the Ausgleich came up for its decennial renegotiation in the late winter of 1917, Franz Ferdinands views on Trialism had changed: at the negotiations, he personally put forward a plan to annex Serbia and make it the core of a third kingdom to add to the personal union, which would embrace Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina as well.
Its not clear that this plan would have prevented the problems with Austro-Hungarian deadlock (it may, indeed, have increased them, and would not have done anything to fix the national identity problems in Romania or Galicia). The proposal did, however, make Franz Ferdinands murderous intentions with regards to Dualism rather clear to the Hungarian diet. Magyars had gotten an outrageously good deal under the Ausgleich; they were free to oppress Croats, Serbs, and Romanians as they desired, could use grain to hold Austrian companies hostage for railroad money, and didnt have to deal with any of those troublesome modernizing things that were all the rage further west. Tisza István, the Hungarian prime minister, rejected the terms, and proposed the status quo, a proposal that probably wouldve been acceptable to any of Franz Josefs governments but which only made Franz Ferdinand, a man as inflexible as the Magyars, even less willing to compromise. Further negotiations went on, although it was increasingly clear that they were desultory and that the main questions were simply being avoided. Eventually they foundered on Franz Ferdinands minimum demand, the institution of universal manhood suffrage in Hungary, which would, presumably, add enough Croats and Romanians to the Hungarian Diet to break funding deadlocks. On April 28, Tisza formally revoked the Ausgleich and declared himself regent; two days later, the Austrian prime minister Karl von Stürgkh declared that a state of war existed between Austria and Hungary.
Hungary was indeed in an unusually good position to try conclusions with the Austrians. Austria-Hungary had operated with a common regular army, but the reserves were divided by nationality, such that they could hardly be called reserves at all: the Landwehr in Cisleithania and the Honvédség in Transleithania. The Honvéd served as a fine nucleus around which to build a larger conscript army, and it was hardly as though the Magyars lacked recruits. But Hungarys relative lack of industrialization meant that a long war was only dubiously sustainable. If it were merely Austria against Hungary and Tisza knew it would not be, for Wilhelm shared Franz Ferdinands desire to crush the Magyars Austria had a strong chance of winning.
The Ausgleich negotiations had caught the attention of all Austrias neighbors, though. In Belgrade, frustrations with the puppet king, Đurađ Obrenović, peaked with the revelation of Franz Ferdinands annexationist ideas. A group of nationalist army officers led by Colonel Petar ivković, in imitation of the coup of 1903, seized the palace and murdered the royal family on April 21. They called Aleksandar Karađorđević, the pretender to the throne, to come back to Belgrade from exile in London, and made preparations to fight the Austrians. Politics made for strange bedfellows, and the new Serbian regime was more than happy to fight alongside the very Hungarians that were oppressing fellow Serbs just across the Danube in Vojvodina if it meant they could get a crack at the hated Habsburgs. And ivković had not acted alone, but with the connivance of some opportunistic British agents operating not entirely with government sanction but now that he had succeeded, London was more than happy to talk to him and to Tisza.
Thus, in the first few days of May, the Ententes Balkan allies and Italy, of course made various ultimatums to Austria demanding territory, all of which were, of course, nakedly aggressive and imperialistic, and designed to be rejected. Only in Romania did the government suffer a brief bout of confusion, with many ministers extremely unhappy about allying with the Magyars. Nicolson had to convince the British cabinet to formally declare a commitment to getting the Hungarians to revise the boundaries of Transylvania before the Romanians followed through and joined the chorus. In due course, naturally, all of the various ultimatums were rejected, as if Franz Ferdinand could do anything else. Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister, hurriedly issued calls to arms to Berlin, Sofia, and St. Petersburg, while Conrad, his entire army in complete disarray, desperately tried to manage a semblance of a mobilization.
Joffre was quick to realize that the sudden collapse of Austria gave the Entente its best chance it had had for the entire war. Originally, he had expected to manage the Balkan front with the forces on hand from the various allied states there, but with Austria itself apparently on the verge of collapse, he immediately detailed almost the entire French general reserve to entrain to Italy to join the push to the Ljubljana Gap. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Robertson, was slow to go along with this being in favor of renewing the pressure in Belgium but eventually Kitchener, who saw the potential of the Balkan front, convinced him to detach most of Second Army to add to the New Army divisions forming up in southern England to create a Fourth Army to sent to Thessaloniki. (Fisher, predictably, argued for an amphibious invasion, this time of Austrian Dalmatia. He was overwhelmingly overruled, with several cabinet members noting the difficulty of invading in the teeth of the K.u.K. navy, especially in light of the losses suffered off Borkum, Robertson reminding everyone of the loss of most of the Royal Marines, and Maurice Hankey commenting that the Dalmatian coast had few communications with the interior and thus any force landing there would be unable to exploit a victory.)
With the Habsburg armies having virtually ceased to exist, the Italians made easy progress to Trieste and Trent, and began to push into the Tyrol. From there, things got significantly messier, as the Austrians began to put up more resistance, coming chiefly from their legendary jägers, and Italian communications got worse. The invading force had been intelligently leavened by many veterans of the Ethiopian mountain war; less intelligent were its dispositions, the work of the chief of the general staff, Luigi Cadorna, who was not exactly the brightest star in the firmament of Italian military thought (no mean feat). Still, with the addition of Maunourys French troops from late May, the Italians were making reasonable progress up the Gap of Ljubljana, and in the first week of June, a unit of Bersaglieri successfully broke into Innsbruck. At the same time, Szurmay Sándors Honvéds were besieging Eisenstadt and Pressburg, while an extemporized Serbian army under the command of Petar Bojović was busily engaged in massacring Croat militias (and plenty of people who werent in militias, to the general horror of everybody who didnt know how wars were fought in the Balkans). Bulgaria, for its part, had effectively ceased to exist, with Romanians, Greeks, Serbs, and Ottomans overwhelming the pretty-good-but-not-invincible Bulgarian armies of Kliment Boyadzhiev. A shattered Bulgarian remnant managed to pull back to Varna, where Vladimir Vazov directed an energetic defense against the overextended Greek and Turkish troops that besieged the city.
Then things began to unravel. The first hiccup was at Ljubjlana, where Armando Diazs Italians began to move in to occupy the city in strength. On June 11, they ran head-on into a German army, the newly formed Twelfth, one of those intended for Mackensens breakthrough at Verdun but instead detailed to fire brigade duties. Its commander, Alexander von Linsingen, was not a General Staff man, but he was one of Mackensens protégés, and a sound field commander with a bullheaded temperament; moreover, he was assisted by an excellent chief of staff, Hans von Seeckt, who more than covered for many of his commanders intellectual shortcomings. The Italians had hitherto fought disorganized Habsburg troops denuded of Hungarian-born NCOs and officers, but now they were up against the better-trained, -equipped, and led Germans, who were furthermore spared the confusion of a civil war. It was hardly much of a surprise that the Italians wilted and fell back. It was, however, very serious for the rest of the front, as Innsbruck was now uncovered, and its supply lines easy prey for the jägers.
The most serious threat to the Austrians came from the Hungarians. Already in late May several German staff officers had been sent to help provide a backbone for the Austrian defenses around Vienna, to reorganize the units there into a semblance of a field army. The result, by June 20, was a force that was reasonably capable of standing on its own, commanded by Arthur Arz von Straußenburg. It served as the pivot for Mackensens other army, the Twelfth, commanded by Leopold, prince of Bavaria (called out of retirement for ONE. LAST. MISSION.), with Max Hoffmann serving as chief of staff. Twelfth Army had been deployed by rail into Slovakia, where a national defense committee had organized effective resistance to the Hungarians and pledged loyalty to Vienna. With Arz von Straußenbergs troops putting up a lively fight in front of the capital, Hoffmann and Leopold had the luxury of setting things up properly. When the German attack crashed in, the token screen the Hungarians had given to the forces covering Slovakia collapsed, and the Germans pushed on towards Komorn.
Finally, the Russians too sent troops, with Sukhomlinov and the stavka almost overjoyed to a) get the opportunity to recoup their influence in the Balkans and b) finally be able to deploy troops to a theater that wasnt on the other side of the world. The Southwest Front forming up around Odessa basically a reinforced army was given a commander, Radko Dimitriev, who was, in fact, a Bulgarian war hero on loan to Stavka. His appointment was more propaganda coup than intelligent selection, although Sukhomlinov and the velikiy knyaz mitigated the damage by assigning the general staff planner Yuri Danilov as his chief of staff (mostly to get him out of Sukhomlinovs hair). Dimitrievs troops encountered stiff resistance from the Romanians, who had held back most of their army, unwilling to work with the Magyars; they were augmented, from mid-July, by an Ottoman army under the command of Mustafa Kemal, released from the siege of Varna. After the first attacks on Iasi were driven back bloodily, Dimitriev waited a few weeks to link up with Moritz von Auffenbergs Fourth Austrian Army (in reality a motley collection of Polish Landwehr and disorganized regulars) from the Bukovina. The joint attack on Botosani that ensued did not make appreciably more progress than the one on Iasi, and the Russians were forced to disengage with significant losses.
In a meeting between Nikolai Nikolaievich, Conrad, and Mackensen at OHL (which had been moved to Potsdam) on July 14, the League powers managed to convince themselves that the grand invasion of the Balkans was, in fact, an opportunity. Conrad was eager to settle accounts with Italy, and argued that Linsingens army could provide the spearhead for an invasion of the Po valley and, after that, Provence, providing a back door into southern France. More interesting to Nikolai Nikolaievich personally was the opportunity to disembowel the Ottoman Empire. Once Hungary and Serbia were crushed and Bulgaria revived a fairly tall order the road to Tsargrad would be open. The Germans had rather pointedly avoided figuring out what would be done with the Straits before then, and the Russian delegation tried to bring it up again (failing to get a definite answer). Mackensen ultimately threw a damp towel on the proceedings by noting that the situation was still extremely fluid and far from stabilized. Germany had thrown in the strategic reserve, against his better judgment, but the British Fourth Army and the Greek Army had not yet made their appearance, and the French were still barely beginning to file into line in the Tyrol. The opportunity certainly existed for a decisive campaign, but they were far from out of the woods yet.
Mackensens sobriety was a product not merely of the European situation but also that of China. For Jiang, hoping to break the bloody stalemate in eastern China, had finally convinced the Japanese and the Australians to launch an amphibious invasion of Zhili to try a knockout blow against Beijing. With the Royal Navys China Station and the IJN screening Port Arthur, the way into the Bo Hai would be quite clear, and from the coast it was a quick trip to Beijing. Even if the imperial government and Yuan Shikai were not captured, the loss of Beijing, its factories, and railroads would cripple the Beiyang Army and Falkenhayns Chinese expeditionary forces further south.
In the time-honored tradition of western assaults on Beijing, the Entente forces would be focusing on the capture of Tianjin. Formerly, the Dagu forts had controlled the approaches to the city, but after the Boxer rebellion most of these had been dismantled. The Entente troops did have to contend with mines, which had only been in their infancy seventeen years prior and which were effectively the only means the Qing and their European allies had of defending the Bo Hai, with Spees squadron at the bottom of the Atlantic and the Russians cowering in Port Arthur. Still, none of the key planners Robertson, the Japanese general Yui Mitsue, Aylmer Hunter-Weston (the overall commander of the expedition), Alexander Godley, or the Australian William Bridges believed that the resistance at Tianjin would be particularly heavy. Beijing would be by far the toughest nut to crack, but by then they could ship Jiangs troops into Zhili to provide the raw manpower to reach the capital.
It was unfortunate for them that Yuan Shikai was such a paranoid man. In 1915 he had ordered Wang Yitang to form a several-division army in Zhili in case of foreign invasion and to serve as a general reserve for the armies in the south. During Jiangs Spring and Autumn Offensives much of the Army of Zhilis manpower had been siphoned off to stiffen the southern armies, but a hard core remained around Beijing and Tianjin. By 1917, its commander, Wu Peifu, had been carrying on a running bureaucratic battle with Duan Qirui for years, successfully resisting demands to redeploy to shore up the front in Jiangsu, with Duan claiming that Wu was just using his reinforced corps to create a little fiefdom up in Tianjin. Whatever the reason for Wus refusal to leave the area, it came in handy when the ANZACs and Japanese hit the beach near the Dagu forts on June 4, for his troops were fairly close to the action and had already plotted out excellent defensive positions.
Yet Wu lacked the manpower to cover every single landing that the Entente forces were making. While some beaches were covered by machine gun nests one beach in particular, the Australian-assigned Beach O, saw Entente casualties climb to 80% of the original attacking force most were wide open and free. Yet on many of these, the Entente troops failed to advance, some out of insouciance, others from a well-practiced desire to entrench at their landing points. Opportunities to push inland in the face of no opposition were sometimes missed entirely. Furthermore, the Entente troops were bedeviled by communications problems not to mention good old nationalistic suspicion and racism between the Australians and Japanese. All of these delays were vital, for they allowed Wu time to draw in his other divisions from the rest of Zhili. By the morning of June 5, Wus immediate forces available on the beaches had tripled, while the Entente troops were far from their objectives.
Wu was critically short of one key resource, though, artillery. Conversely, with the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy cruising offshore, the Entente forces had that in abundance. Though the subsequent attacks on the remnant of the Dagu forts were bloody, they were, by June 6, successful, and the Japanese in particular began to expand their beachhead around towards the outskirts of Tianjin. With Japanese gunboats supporting the invasion force by moving down the Bei He River, Wus troops were ground down and forced to retreat step by step. On June 12, Godleys ANZACs broke into Tianjin, and began to slog through house-to-house fighting to drive Wus Zhili troops from the port. Here, the Australians gained the distinction of being the first to employ flamethrowers in combat, using them extensively in the rubble of Tianjin to clear out ratholes where Wus soldiers lay in ambush.
The eight days that Wu had bought with the aid of Entente mistakes permitted the redeployment of several Russian army corps from Brusilovs army. Commanded by Lavr Kornilov, another old China hand, the Russians filed into the Qing trenches and launched diversionary attacks on the Japanese at the northern edge of the landing area. The Russians arrival began to tip the numerical balance back in favor of the defenders, but Hunter-Westons attacks were far from exhausted. Unfortunately for the Entente, it was Hunter-Weston who was directing them. Australians were sent forward against the Sino-Russian trench lines in mass attacks to try to outflank the unsporting defenders in Tianjins urban areas to the south and southeast and were killed in droves, having not had the sort of experience storming fortified lines that the British, Japanese, Russians, or Germans (or even the Beiyang Army) had. While the Australian casualties in the villages of Jinghai County were not particularly large compared with those of the regular British troops, much less those of the Japanese, their role in later Australian national consciousness and the memory of Tianjin was extremely large. By late August, Hunter-Weston was preparing to mount one last big push from the area of the old Japanese Concession with a newly arrived division of Republican troops, but this too ran into heavy resistance and bogged down.
In July, with the Tianjin landings stalled, Jiang had prepared for a fresh offensive in Jiangsu, hoping that the defense of Zhili was at least distracting the Qing and drawing off reserves from the Beiyang Armys frontline units. It was, but not enough: Jiangs troops pushed Duans hardened veterans out of Guannan and forced the evacuation of most of the Jiangsu coast, but at outrageously disproportionate casualties. The Beiyang Army was able to construct a fresh and more compact defensive line on the Xinyi River. Although his troops kept advancing, Nanjing saw only long rolls of casualties with no end in sight. Yuan still remained defiant in Beijing. Some of the more militarily astute in Nanjing also believed that Jiangs armies were increasingly overstretched, vulnerable to a Qing counterpunch. After an open debate over his leadership in August, Jiang returned to Nanjing from his field headquarters at Xuchang and successfully defended his position, but open doubts remained, and it was clear that the merest slipup would bring Jiang and the Guomindang to an open confrontation.
Such were the conditions when Mackensen warned of overoptimism in his meeting with Conrad and the velikiy knyaz. Overall, the situation was extremely critical, although opportunities were developing as the Entente forces stretched increasingly thin. The best part about the situation, though, was the fact that unlike the Western Front, which remained a war of positions, or Stellungskrieg, the war in the Balkans and China was a true Bewegungskrieg, the war Germanys soldiers had trained for for forty-five years. Mobile operations held out the prospect of decisive victory, and forced officers to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. Such a war could play to Germanys strengths.
By August, the Entente forces, although initially shocked by the Germans advance, had been reinforced by the second echelon, the Greek and British troops. These were planned to be used in a general attack on northern Croatia in conjunction with Petar ivkovićs Serbs, which in turn would reopen the Gap of Ljubjana for the French and Italians. Linsingens army would be squeezed out of the way, and then the British, French, and Greeks could push all the way to Vienna. It was a most cunning plan, or it would have been, had it not rather overstated the Hungarians capacity, in the north, to hold back Leopolds army, which was already on the outskirts of Budapest. And it was awfully optimistic about the ability of anybody to pacify Croatia, which was a total mess. The latter point was proved rather embarrassingly when, in the opening stages of the British Fourth Armys advance, its commander, the well-liked, competent Henry Rawlinson, was shot by a Croat partisan sniper near Osijek. Command devolved on Sir Ian Hamilton, a much more esoteric and erratic character who was instantly less effective at command; he was not helped by the dispatch of King Konstantinos Greeks to the north to shore up the Hungarians around Budapest in belated recognition of the areas vulnerability.
Still, the British assault weakened to a corps equivalent due to wastage and the need to continuously occupy key roads in Croatia diverted Linsingens resources and permitted the Italians to attack Klagenfurt and the French to reach Maribor, where Hamilton met Maunoury on August 21. Trying to take advantage of the excellent weather, the French and Italians renewed their advance, while the British marched on Zagreb; unfortunately, the Italians were unable to push all the way through Klagenfurt, while the French found themselves stalled short of Graz. Still, things seemed to be going pretty well. The Germans that had seemed so terrifying a few months ago before Ljubljana had been forced to retreat back into Styria. It seemed like only a matter of time.
Further north, though, the Greeks were not doing so well. With the Honvéds brushed aside, Konstantinos four corps were all that stood between Leopold and Budapest. Inadequate Greek cavalry led the king to believe that Érsekújvár anchored the German right, instead of constituting the Twelfth Armys center positions. In a series of sharp engagements on August 18 and 19, Konstantinos slowly began to realize that his armys western flanks were hanging and that a German reserve corps was marching hard to overtake them. Retreating precipitately, he was then confronted with the news that Arz von Straußenbergs Viennese troops had broken the siege and were nearing Győr, endangering his rear. The Greek kings fighting retreat took his army southeastward, adroitly covering Budapest in the process. Konstantinos troops were soon joined by Magyar militias in setting up the defense of the city, which was quickly besieged by Arz von Straußenberg. But that retrograde motion (a change of base, as Venizelos was to joke to the American ambassador in Athens) uncovered the western Hungarian plains, leaving them wide open for Twelfth Army to plunge through. Hamilton, in Zagreb, did not quite realize his peril until a few days too late, and ended up losing a division that was spread out on counterinsurgent duty. Maunoury did recognize what was going on, and ordered a retreat just ahead of a vicious counterattack by Linsingens Eleventh Army (for his pains to rescue his troops from a potential envelopment, he was replaced, by Maurice-Paul-Emmanuel Sarrail). Meanwhile, Conrad had been painstakingly reconstituting the Austrian army (something that did not sit well with his notoriously aggressive temperament), and now had another full army to throw into the fray alongside Arz von Straußenbergs; this one, commanded by Viktor Dankl, went into action at Innsbruck, driving the Italians out of the city and making contact with several isolated jäger units. Austria may not have had the capacity to equip the whole army with high quality equipment, but they certainly were able to make it when they had the money; Dankls troops, armed with koda mountain mortars, rained steel hell on the Italians and blew apart any fortified positions their enemies could construct.
By the onset of winter, Leopold and Linsingens armies had reopened contact with the Croat and Bosnian partisans and seized Zagreb from the token British garrison that had been left there, while pushing the French back to Ljubljana and the British to Osijek. The siege of Budapest had begun, and Hungarian resistance, initially extremely heavy, was beginning to wane. The Ententes momentum was not completely lost for instance, in early September, Bojović and his partisans successfully captured Sarajevo from its extemporized Austro-Bosniak garrison, whose commander, Erik von Merizzi, successfully conducted a withdrawal into the countryside to harass Serb supply routes. But most of the major Entente forces in the region had shot their wad, and reinforcements were slow in coming, while the Austrians had passed their moment of greatest vulnerability. To be sure, the League was far from victorious. While the extremely messy Austrian mobilization slowly produced fresh troops to hold the line permitting the occupation of eastern Hungary in October, which almost completely cut Budapest off from the rest of the world the Germans, Austrians, and Russians still took ridiculous losses as they slowly pushed back Entente positions in Budapest, Styria, and Bessarabia. Joffre and Kitchener still held out hope for a renewed advance in the coming spring.
In sharp contrast with the previous two years, the naval war in the North Sea was remarkably quiet in 1917. After the Battle of Borkum, neither side considered itself fully combat-capable. The Germans expected to remedy this by 1918, when the new Bayern-class Dreadnoughts were to be launched. They underwent a bit of a command structure change in 1917 as well; with Alfred von Tirpitz of the Imperial Naval Office retiring to pursue a career in the Reichstag, founding the far-right Vaterlandspartei, Pohl was shunted sideways to get Tirpitzs old job (the final humiliation for Tirpitz, whose protégé, Eduard von Capelle, had been groomed for that job for literally decades), while Ingenohl was promoted to head the naval staff in place of Pohl. When Ingenohl struck his flag in October, his replacement was the widely-admired Reinhard Scheer, head of the Third Battle Squadron, who was the most likable of the battleship admirals and closest to Ingenohls personal views as to how to handle the High Seas Fleet. Scheer and the commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet, Nikolai von Essen, used the opportunity afforded by the limited warfare of 1917 to conduct joint training exercises in the Baltic. With the Russians and the Bayerns added to the strength of the High Seas Fleet, Scheer reckoned that he would have enough firepower to punch through the blockade.
Pohls removal ended the major advocacy of U-boat warfare around the British Isles. Ingenohl strongly felt that the U-boats should be saved for use against the Grand Fleet when Scheer fought his great battle in the North Sea the following year. Of course, the submarine crews had to be kept in top shape, and the Germans ended up using U-boats to harass the British blockading fleet and the Harwich Force. This was always fairly low-level, endemic stuff, with only a few British destroyers sunk; a Portuguese passenger ship was sunk by accident in May 1917, but the Portuguese government already tottering, with open street fighting in Lisbon and several cabinet members assassinated in the past few years was unable to protest much, and the Germans quickly apologized anyway. By and large, British countermeasures against the U-boat threat were proving sufficient.
Fisher finally and abruptly chose to retire over the Balkan campaign in June 1917. Much like Ingenohl in Germany, Jellicoe was kicked upstairs to replace him as First Sea Lord, although in Jellicoes case, it was rather more a case of damage control than confidence in his leadership. (Jellicoe never felt he was treated fairly for how the Battle of Borkum turned out, since hed argued against the plan from the start and preferred to keep the Grand Fleet safely in blockading position. When, after the war, Fishers advocates melted away, Jellicoes memoirs pretty much defined the course of British historiography on the naval war.) Sturdee, who had come out of the Helgoland Bight unscathed and who had won some of the Royal Navys only laurels by destroying Spees squadron off Montevideo, was tapped to succeed him at the head of the Grand Fleet. Sturdee tightened up fleet security and instituted measures to better protect the fleet against mines and submarines, while working to get the Grand Fleets battle squadrons ready for full deployment in the face of the inevitable German offensive. He also tried to experiment with using British submarines in the Baltic, to harass German shipping to and from Sweden and to mess with the Russo-German naval maneuvers. Since the Danish had, controversially, elected not to mine the Belts (with the Germans and Russians putting pressure on them, since the Baltic Fleet would have to use the Belts to access the North Sea), the way was theoretically open, but the unsupported British submarines soon fell prey to German destroyers. The most notable British submarine success the sinking of the Russian Dreadnought Gangut on September 9 was not repeated. It did have the salutary effect of scaring the bejeezus out of the tsar, though. Nikolai, with his customary enthusiasm for naval warfare in general and Dreadnoughts specifically, had been onboard the Ganguts sister ship, Petropavlovsk, viewing the naval maneuvers; to his admirals consternation, not only did he not panic, he attempted to direct the entire fleet in finding and destroying the British submarine.
In the Adriatic, the Italians controversially chose not to face the K.u.K. navy still sitting at Pola, although a Hungarian mutiny in May had pretty much immobilized it but instead chose to try various schemes, some of which were pretty fantastic (one science professor constructed an absurdly long-range torpedo, effectively a small submarine packed full of explosives, with Italian naval ministry funding and tried to fire it at the Dreadnought SMS Tegetthoff, successfully blowing up part of a pier at Pola but leaving the battleship unharmed), to erode the Austrians fleet strength. Without the support of the French Mediterranean Fleet, commanded by the cautious admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère (a cold warrior after the style of Tirpitz, who talked big about big ships but never carried it into practice), the Italians restricted themselves to raiding operations and ferrying troops and supplies to Albania, where minor Italian forces a division equivalent supported Petar Bojovićs Serbs.
Also in 1917, the Russian Black Sea Fleet gained an extra four Dreadnoughts of the Imperatritsa Mariya class, giving them the numerical edge over the Ottomans. They also gained a new commander, Andrei Eberhardt, who was significantly more aggressive than Kanin. Despite intermittent arguments with the commander of his battle squadron, the similarly aggressive Aleksandr Kolchak, Eberhardt managed to run the fleet effectively, and scored his first victory off Cape Bafra in June, sinking several transports as well as a hapless Ottoman battlecruiser that attempted to come to their aid. With the Russian Black Sea Fleet locking down naval communications with the Caucasus Front, the Ottoman armies there began to suffer serious problems (see below). Eberhardt then provided naval support for convoys to keep Vazovs Bulgarians at Varna supplied over the summer and fall, and covered the landing of a full Russian army corps there in October, stiffening Bulgarian resistance and ending the Greek general Anastasios Papoulas efforts to capture the Varna beachhead for the year.
With adequate logistical support in place the fruit of two years of frantic railroad construction Yudenich finally launched a grand Caucasus offensive in early June 1917. Despite the chief of staffs uneasiness about the project, which he felt had been unnecessarily forced on him by Plehve and Stavka, the Russians outperformed expectations. With the Ottoman armies even more broken down than Yudenich knew, due in no small part to Eberhardts raids on the Black Sea coastal lifeline, Hafiz Hakki Paşa, the commander replacing Enver in charge of the Caucasus armies, was basically stuck. With supplies well in hand and Cossacks deploying in clouds to limit Ottoman movements, the Russians could actually move faster than could the Turks. With the Russian left wing unexpectedly coming down over the Çakir Baba Mountains, which Hakki had expected to use as a flank guard, the Ottomans were cut off from the Erzurum road. The commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army, Mehmet Zeki Paşa, belatedly realized his predicament, and directed his corps in frantic, but poorly coordinated, attacks against the Russians now blocking the way to Erzurum. By June 14, with Russians coming up from Sarikamiş, Zeki finally gave up the ghost, and surrendered with his command of well over 110,000 men. This victory at the Battle of Hasankale cemented Yudenichs military reputation and fired the imagination of the Russian press, who called for a crusade and predicted that Jerusalem and Tsargrad would fall before the year was out. Yudenich intelligently didnt try for such outlandish goals and restricted his army to the capture of Erzurum and Trabzon, which as it was caused quite the panic in Constantinople. The Russians did not have anything close to that kind of success in Iran, though. Alekseyev fought a second bloodletting that fall, the Lake Namak Offensive, which wasted tens of thousands of trained soldiers and gained the Russians absolutely no ground. Fortunately for Alekseyev, the Constitutionalists were in no position to exploit the Russian defeat.
Entente calculations for the Balkans had rested on one major assumption: the Germans inability to dispatch their reserves to Viennas aid. To this end, Joffre had launched a limited offensive in Luxembourg in June 1917. It didnt take, obviously; the Germans were able to resist even without the use of the theater reserve, and Mackensen, as above, went ahead with the redeployment. But with Leopolds army getting bogged down in the siege of Budapest as the fall dragged on, Joffre began to conceive a fresh offensive plan. Germanys reserves were as used up as they would have been on the Western Front. Now, with Budapest as the anvil, the British Fourth Army, reconstituting itself in the Banat, could be the hammer. Then, with the Germans wiped out, the Anglo-Greek armies could advance to Vienna and dictate terms in the Hofburg. Thus, Joffre planned a winter offensive; Sarrails army in Carniola would cross the Drava in support, while the British and Serbs pushed north along the Danube to relieve Budapest, all the while aided by Magyar partisans. It was an exceedingly cunning plan, although it relied a bit too much on the Ententes ability to supply a large British army on the offensive with lines of communication that snaked down through Belgrade all the way through partisan-infested Macedonia to Thessaloniki.
Hamiltons offensive, set for late January 1918, was preempted by one of those unfortunate contingent events that derail plans. For Konstantinos was making his own plans in Budapest; unwilling to let his army stand and die in defense of the ungrateful Magyars fighting against his in-law Wilhelms army with which he had always felt a certain kinship and affinity. Konstantinos had built Greeces mass peasant conscript army in the previous two decades, and didnt want to lose it now. At the same time, he was leery of the growth in Venizelos power, backed now by the British themselves; while he and his soldiers fought and died for Venizelos Entente connections, the prime minister was busily undermining his royal prerogatives at home. So the Greek king quietly began negotiating with the Germans on the side during November and December 1917, and finalized an agreement on January 6, the Greek Christmas Eve. The four Greek army corps in the Budapest defenses surrendered the next day, leaving gaping holes in the citys defenses. From then on, the outcome was never in doubt, and those small pockets of Hungarians that were able to mount an effective defense were easily outflanked and/or shelled with poison gas. By January 13, the city had been cleared of major resistance. Tisza was captured by the Germans, who turned him over to the Austrians; controversially, Arz von Straußenberg had him tried before a military tribunal and shot, reportedly on Franz Ferdinands orders, for which he was relieved of command (in response to outraged public opinion) and punted upstairs to the Belvedere as one of the Kaisers closest personal military advisors.
With the Greek army in hand, and an incipient civil war brewing in Greece itself where Venizelos pledged loyalty to the Entente, declaring a republic on January 20 Hoffmann prepared a fresh offensive. Ever since Konstantinos had begun to negotiate with the Germans, Hoffmann had thought of launching a stroke across the Danube, then crossing through Serbia to Bulgaria and Romania and then on to Constantinople and Athens. The velikiy knyazs Grand Design from July might actually be practical. Germanys first newly trained divisions of the year thus went to the Twelfth Army, which launched its hammerblow across the Danube with the assistance of Habsburg river gunboats on February 2. Hamilton had been expecting the attack, but it was one thing to expect it, and another entirely to repulse it. Confronted with a well targeted German artillery bombardment and, again, poison gas at key intervals along the front, the British were forced back. ivković had planned to turn Belgrade into an urban fortress, a nightmare for the Germans to invade, but King Aleksandar ignored his blandishments, uninterested in yet another suicide stand, and declared Belgrade an open city, ordering the army to retreat to Ni, where it could try to catch the Germans when they were overextended and put the mountain terrain to good use. Ordering such a retreat of a disciplined force was one thing, but the post-Second Balkan War Serbian army was not a disciplined force, and it collapsed under pressure from German cavalry. The British, at least, maintained good order, but Hamilton pulled them precipitately all the way back to Thessaloniki, fearful for his flanks and conscious of Kitcheners warning not to lose trained British troops uselessly. For fear of wasting his soldiers in hopeless fighting, though, Hamilton wasted them by not fighting.
With the collapse of the Entente armies in Serbia, everything began to unravel. Joffres masterstroke had to be abandoned, as the Italians and French in the Alps suddenly found themselves to be extremely exposed. Linsingen and Seeckt mounted their own attack in the Gap of Ljubljana in early April, targeting the Italian formations to isolate the French. It did not say anything good about Italian military capacity that the Germans tactics worked swimmingly. The military catastrophe referred to by the Germans as the Battle of Cilli saw Italian troops, already unnerved by jäger attacks and by the unforgiving climate of an Alpine winter, break completely. Two of Sarrails French divisions were cut off and forced to surrender as well. It was on the retreat from Cilli that everything went to hell, though. The Italian army, rather like that of the Serbs, virtually disintegrated, leaving Sarrails French and a few of Armando Diazs scattered divisions as the only guardians of northern Italy. At the Austrian high command in Vienna (Armee Oberkommando, or AOK), Conrad pressed for an all-out pursuit, despite the need for Austrian troops to restore order within the empire itself. He got his wish, as the Germans and Austrians pushed further. League forces had recaptured Trieste and Trent by early June, and were standing on the Piave a few weeks later.
Confronted with Germans, Austrians, and Russians on three sides, the outnumbered Romanians attempted to go the way of King Konstantinos in April 1918 and back the League up in exchange for not being utterly wiped out. This was, of course, after Dimitrievs Russians had already captured Iasi, and only a few days before the Austrians reentered Kronstadt. Franz Ferdinand demanded that the offer be ignored, but the Russians, interested in gaining some Balkan leverage, held the reins, and they were more than willing to act as Romanias protectors against the Austrians. The more aggressive party in Vienna was left to fume about the Russians denying them the fruits of their victory, while the more pragmatic ones, like Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, fumed at how the hawks had successfully dropped Romania into Russias lap after being handed a perfect opportunity for reconciliation on a silver platter. At any rate, Austria did manage to get several concessions on specific issues in the armistice, with broad hints at more significant ones in a formal treaty.
In early summer, there was something of a pause. The Three Emperors League had reached quite far in the last few months. Twelfth Army was at Ni, preparing to plunge into Macedonia and Bulgaria. Dimitrievs Front was standing on the Danube, backed up by the so-called Austrian Third Army of Adolf von Brudermann. Dankls Austrians and Linsingens Eleventh Army were standing on the Piave, preparing to plunge into northern Italy. And Vazov had begun to make his move already, as Ottoman troops pulled out of Romania and towards a defensible line in the Rhodope Mountains. The Bulgarian beachhead had been widened significantly and had already made contact with Russian Cossacks. Sofia was still in Greco-Turkish hands, albeit extremely tenuously. The Leagues combat power was, however, considerably decreased by the need to keep Austrian troops on partisan control operations, especially when Petar ivković resurfaced in Serbia and Bosnia at the head of a sizable partisan force. The Serbs briefly recaptured Belgrade in late May, spurring serious reprisals. More darkly, the Austrian troops also had to be detached from the front lines to conduct mass murders of Hungarians and Serbs in many places around the former Kingdom of Hungary (which was officially dissolved). Whether these were ever officially sanctioned by Vienna remains a hotly debated topic to this day.
The Ententes leaders did not sit idly by as their troops Balkan positions collapsed. But the fall of Budapest did spur a shakeup in both Britains and Frances command structures. The Doumergue government, a long-lasting one by the standards of the Third Republic, finally collapsed in February, depriving Joffre of the protection of Messimy. Alexandre Millerand managed to gather enough Socialist support to add to the Poincaré-loyal Right in the Chamber of Deputies to form a fresh government, but the price was the dismissal of Joffre, who was replaced at GQG by Foch on March 11. Robertson was similarly Lloyd Georges scapegoat; the PM wanted to replace him with Sir John French but French declined, partly out of ongoing opposition to the governments Ulster policy, and remained in overall command in Iran and Central Asia. Instead, General Sir Archibald Murray was tapped to be the CIGS. Effectively, he was a conduit for Kitchener, who now attempted to run both mobilization and planning. The ultimate effect of this shuffling was to unhinge any plans for counterattack. However, Foch did have a lot of manpower with which to play, and, now that he was replacing Joffre, goodwill sufficient to use it. He therefore planned a diversionary attack on Liège for the first week in July to hopefully draw the Germans into a long slugging match. The French would seize control of key heights in the neighborhood of the fortress and then permit the Germans and Belgians to waste their manpower trying to recapture them, thus weakening the forces in the Balkans. It was an exceedingly cunning plan, but the implementation was flawed, and most of the French troops never reached those commanding heights and instead got stuck in long slogging attacks that made scant progress. Foch called off the attacks in late July before casualties could mount, having managed to draw off a portion of the German reserves, but not nearly enough to justify a continued assault.
Still, the British assault weakened to a corps equivalent due to wastage and the need to continuously occupy key roads in Croatia diverted Linsingens resources and permitted the Italians to attack Klagenfurt and the French to reach Maribor, where Hamilton met Maunoury on August 21. Trying to take advantage of the excellent weather, the French and Italians renewed their advance, while the British marched on Zagreb; unfortunately, the Italians were unable to push all the way through Klagenfurt, while the French found themselves stalled short of Graz. Still, things seemed to be going pretty well. The Germans that had seemed so terrifying a few months ago before Ljubljana had been forced to retreat back into Styria. It seemed like only a matter of time.
Further north, though, the Greeks were not doing so well. With the Honvéds brushed aside, Konstantinos four corps were all that stood between Leopold and Budapest. Inadequate Greek cavalry led the king to believe that Érsekújvár anchored the German right, instead of constituting the Twelfth Armys center positions. In a series of sharp engagements on August 18 and 19, Konstantinos slowly began to realize that his armys western flanks were hanging and that a German reserve corps was marching hard to overtake them. Retreating precipitately, he was then confronted with the news that Arz von Straußenbergs Viennese troops had broken the siege and were nearing Győr, endangering his rear. The Greek kings fighting retreat took his army southeastward, adroitly covering Budapest in the process. Konstantinos troops were soon joined by Magyar militias in setting up the defense of the city, which was quickly besieged by Arz von Straußenberg. But that retrograde motion (a change of base, as Venizelos was to joke to the American ambassador in Athens) uncovered the western Hungarian plains, leaving them wide open for Twelfth Army to plunge through. Hamilton, in Zagreb, did not quite realize his peril until a few days too late, and ended up losing a division that was spread out on counterinsurgent duty. Maunoury did recognize what was going on, and ordered a retreat just ahead of a vicious counterattack by Linsingens Eleventh Army (for his pains to rescue his troops from a potential envelopment, he was replaced, by Maurice-Paul-Emmanuel Sarrail). Meanwhile, Conrad had been painstakingly reconstituting the Austrian army (something that did not sit well with his notoriously aggressive temperament), and now had another full army to throw into the fray alongside Arz von Straußenbergs; this one, commanded by Viktor Dankl, went into action at Innsbruck, driving the Italians out of the city and making contact with several isolated jäger units. Austria may not have had the capacity to equip the whole army with high quality equipment, but they certainly were able to make it when they had the money; Dankls troops, armed with koda mountain mortars, rained steel hell on the Italians and blew apart any fortified positions their enemies could construct.
By the onset of winter, Leopold and Linsingens armies had reopened contact with the Croat and Bosnian partisans and seized Zagreb from the token British garrison that had been left there, while pushing the French back to Ljubljana and the British to Osijek. The siege of Budapest had begun, and Hungarian resistance, initially extremely heavy, was beginning to wane. The Ententes momentum was not completely lost for instance, in early September, Bojović and his partisans successfully captured Sarajevo from its extemporized Austro-Bosniak garrison, whose commander, Erik von Merizzi, successfully conducted a withdrawal into the countryside to harass Serb supply routes. But most of the major Entente forces in the region had shot their wad, and reinforcements were slow in coming, while the Austrians had passed their moment of greatest vulnerability. To be sure, the League was far from victorious. While the extremely messy Austrian mobilization slowly produced fresh troops to hold the line permitting the occupation of eastern Hungary in October, which almost completely cut Budapest off from the rest of the world the Germans, Austrians, and Russians still took ridiculous losses as they slowly pushed back Entente positions in Budapest, Styria, and Bessarabia. Joffre and Kitchener still held out hope for a renewed advance in the coming spring.
In sharp contrast with the previous two years, the naval war in the North Sea was remarkably quiet in 1917. After the Battle of Borkum, neither side considered itself fully combat-capable. The Germans expected to remedy this by 1918, when the new Bayern-class Dreadnoughts were to be launched. They underwent a bit of a command structure change in 1917 as well; with Alfred von Tirpitz of the Imperial Naval Office retiring to pursue a career in the Reichstag, founding the far-right Vaterlandspartei, Pohl was shunted sideways to get Tirpitzs old job (the final humiliation for Tirpitz, whose protégé, Eduard von Capelle, had been groomed for that job for literally decades), while Ingenohl was promoted to head the naval staff in place of Pohl. When Ingenohl struck his flag in October, his replacement was the widely-admired Reinhard Scheer, head of the Third Battle Squadron, who was the most likable of the battleship admirals and closest to Ingenohls personal views as to how to handle the High Seas Fleet. Scheer and the commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet, Nikolai von Essen, used the opportunity afforded by the limited warfare of 1917 to conduct joint training exercises in the Baltic. With the Russians and the Bayerns added to the strength of the High Seas Fleet, Scheer reckoned that he would have enough firepower to punch through the blockade.
Pohls removal ended the major advocacy of U-boat warfare around the British Isles. Ingenohl strongly felt that the U-boats should be saved for use against the Grand Fleet when Scheer fought his great battle in the North Sea the following year. Of course, the submarine crews had to be kept in top shape, and the Germans ended up using U-boats to harass the British blockading fleet and the Harwich Force. This was always fairly low-level, endemic stuff, with only a few British destroyers sunk; a Portuguese passenger ship was sunk by accident in May 1917, but the Portuguese government already tottering, with open street fighting in Lisbon and several cabinet members assassinated in the past few years was unable to protest much, and the Germans quickly apologized anyway. By and large, British countermeasures against the U-boat threat were proving sufficient.
Fisher finally and abruptly chose to retire over the Balkan campaign in June 1917. Much like Ingenohl in Germany, Jellicoe was kicked upstairs to replace him as First Sea Lord, although in Jellicoes case, it was rather more a case of damage control than confidence in his leadership. (Jellicoe never felt he was treated fairly for how the Battle of Borkum turned out, since hed argued against the plan from the start and preferred to keep the Grand Fleet safely in blockading position. When, after the war, Fishers advocates melted away, Jellicoes memoirs pretty much defined the course of British historiography on the naval war.) Sturdee, who had come out of the Helgoland Bight unscathed and who had won some of the Royal Navys only laurels by destroying Spees squadron off Montevideo, was tapped to succeed him at the head of the Grand Fleet. Sturdee tightened up fleet security and instituted measures to better protect the fleet against mines and submarines, while working to get the Grand Fleets battle squadrons ready for full deployment in the face of the inevitable German offensive. He also tried to experiment with using British submarines in the Baltic, to harass German shipping to and from Sweden and to mess with the Russo-German naval maneuvers. Since the Danish had, controversially, elected not to mine the Belts (with the Germans and Russians putting pressure on them, since the Baltic Fleet would have to use the Belts to access the North Sea), the way was theoretically open, but the unsupported British submarines soon fell prey to German destroyers. The most notable British submarine success the sinking of the Russian Dreadnought Gangut on September 9 was not repeated. It did have the salutary effect of scaring the bejeezus out of the tsar, though. Nikolai, with his customary enthusiasm for naval warfare in general and Dreadnoughts specifically, had been onboard the Ganguts sister ship, Petropavlovsk, viewing the naval maneuvers; to his admirals consternation, not only did he not panic, he attempted to direct the entire fleet in finding and destroying the British submarine.
In the Adriatic, the Italians controversially chose not to face the K.u.K. navy still sitting at Pola, although a Hungarian mutiny in May had pretty much immobilized it but instead chose to try various schemes, some of which were pretty fantastic (one science professor constructed an absurdly long-range torpedo, effectively a small submarine packed full of explosives, with Italian naval ministry funding and tried to fire it at the Dreadnought SMS Tegetthoff, successfully blowing up part of a pier at Pola but leaving the battleship unharmed), to erode the Austrians fleet strength. Without the support of the French Mediterranean Fleet, commanded by the cautious admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère (a cold warrior after the style of Tirpitz, who talked big about big ships but never carried it into practice), the Italians restricted themselves to raiding operations and ferrying troops and supplies to Albania, where minor Italian forces a division equivalent supported Petar Bojovićs Serbs.
Also in 1917, the Russian Black Sea Fleet gained an extra four Dreadnoughts of the Imperatritsa Mariya class, giving them the numerical edge over the Ottomans. They also gained a new commander, Andrei Eberhardt, who was significantly more aggressive than Kanin. Despite intermittent arguments with the commander of his battle squadron, the similarly aggressive Aleksandr Kolchak, Eberhardt managed to run the fleet effectively, and scored his first victory off Cape Bafra in June, sinking several transports as well as a hapless Ottoman battlecruiser that attempted to come to their aid. With the Russian Black Sea Fleet locking down naval communications with the Caucasus Front, the Ottoman armies there began to suffer serious problems (see below). Eberhardt then provided naval support for convoys to keep Vazovs Bulgarians at Varna supplied over the summer and fall, and covered the landing of a full Russian army corps there in October, stiffening Bulgarian resistance and ending the Greek general Anastasios Papoulas efforts to capture the Varna beachhead for the year.
With adequate logistical support in place the fruit of two years of frantic railroad construction Yudenich finally launched a grand Caucasus offensive in early June 1917. Despite the chief of staffs uneasiness about the project, which he felt had been unnecessarily forced on him by Plehve and Stavka, the Russians outperformed expectations. With the Ottoman armies even more broken down than Yudenich knew, due in no small part to Eberhardts raids on the Black Sea coastal lifeline, Hafiz Hakki Paşa, the commander replacing Enver in charge of the Caucasus armies, was basically stuck. With supplies well in hand and Cossacks deploying in clouds to limit Ottoman movements, the Russians could actually move faster than could the Turks. With the Russian left wing unexpectedly coming down over the Çakir Baba Mountains, which Hakki had expected to use as a flank guard, the Ottomans were cut off from the Erzurum road. The commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army, Mehmet Zeki Paşa, belatedly realized his predicament, and directed his corps in frantic, but poorly coordinated, attacks against the Russians now blocking the way to Erzurum. By June 14, with Russians coming up from Sarikamiş, Zeki finally gave up the ghost, and surrendered with his command of well over 110,000 men. This victory at the Battle of Hasankale cemented Yudenichs military reputation and fired the imagination of the Russian press, who called for a crusade and predicted that Jerusalem and Tsargrad would fall before the year was out. Yudenich intelligently didnt try for such outlandish goals and restricted his army to the capture of Erzurum and Trabzon, which as it was caused quite the panic in Constantinople. The Russians did not have anything close to that kind of success in Iran, though. Alekseyev fought a second bloodletting that fall, the Lake Namak Offensive, which wasted tens of thousands of trained soldiers and gained the Russians absolutely no ground. Fortunately for Alekseyev, the Constitutionalists were in no position to exploit the Russian defeat.
Entente calculations for the Balkans had rested on one major assumption: the Germans inability to dispatch their reserves to Viennas aid. To this end, Joffre had launched a limited offensive in Luxembourg in June 1917. It didnt take, obviously; the Germans were able to resist even without the use of the theater reserve, and Mackensen, as above, went ahead with the redeployment. But with Leopolds army getting bogged down in the siege of Budapest as the fall dragged on, Joffre began to conceive a fresh offensive plan. Germanys reserves were as used up as they would have been on the Western Front. Now, with Budapest as the anvil, the British Fourth Army, reconstituting itself in the Banat, could be the hammer. Then, with the Germans wiped out, the Anglo-Greek armies could advance to Vienna and dictate terms in the Hofburg. Thus, Joffre planned a winter offensive; Sarrails army in Carniola would cross the Drava in support, while the British and Serbs pushed north along the Danube to relieve Budapest, all the while aided by Magyar partisans. It was an exceedingly cunning plan, although it relied a bit too much on the Ententes ability to supply a large British army on the offensive with lines of communication that snaked down through Belgrade all the way through partisan-infested Macedonia to Thessaloniki.
Hamiltons offensive, set for late January 1918, was preempted by one of those unfortunate contingent events that derail plans. For Konstantinos was making his own plans in Budapest; unwilling to let his army stand and die in defense of the ungrateful Magyars fighting against his in-law Wilhelms army with which he had always felt a certain kinship and affinity. Konstantinos had built Greeces mass peasant conscript army in the previous two decades, and didnt want to lose it now. At the same time, he was leery of the growth in Venizelos power, backed now by the British themselves; while he and his soldiers fought and died for Venizelos Entente connections, the prime minister was busily undermining his royal prerogatives at home. So the Greek king quietly began negotiating with the Germans on the side during November and December 1917, and finalized an agreement on January 6, the Greek Christmas Eve. The four Greek army corps in the Budapest defenses surrendered the next day, leaving gaping holes in the citys defenses. From then on, the outcome was never in doubt, and those small pockets of Hungarians that were able to mount an effective defense were easily outflanked and/or shelled with poison gas. By January 13, the city had been cleared of major resistance. Tisza was captured by the Germans, who turned him over to the Austrians; controversially, Arz von Straußenberg had him tried before a military tribunal and shot, reportedly on Franz Ferdinands orders, for which he was relieved of command (in response to outraged public opinion) and punted upstairs to the Belvedere as one of the Kaisers closest personal military advisors.
With the Greek army in hand, and an incipient civil war brewing in Greece itself where Venizelos pledged loyalty to the Entente, declaring a republic on January 20 Hoffmann prepared a fresh offensive. Ever since Konstantinos had begun to negotiate with the Germans, Hoffmann had thought of launching a stroke across the Danube, then crossing through Serbia to Bulgaria and Romania and then on to Constantinople and Athens. The velikiy knyazs Grand Design from July might actually be practical. Germanys first newly trained divisions of the year thus went to the Twelfth Army, which launched its hammerblow across the Danube with the assistance of Habsburg river gunboats on February 2. Hamilton had been expecting the attack, but it was one thing to expect it, and another entirely to repulse it. Confronted with a well targeted German artillery bombardment and, again, poison gas at key intervals along the front, the British were forced back. ivković had planned to turn Belgrade into an urban fortress, a nightmare for the Germans to invade, but King Aleksandar ignored his blandishments, uninterested in yet another suicide stand, and declared Belgrade an open city, ordering the army to retreat to Ni, where it could try to catch the Germans when they were overextended and put the mountain terrain to good use. Ordering such a retreat of a disciplined force was one thing, but the post-Second Balkan War Serbian army was not a disciplined force, and it collapsed under pressure from German cavalry. The British, at least, maintained good order, but Hamilton pulled them precipitately all the way back to Thessaloniki, fearful for his flanks and conscious of Kitcheners warning not to lose trained British troops uselessly. For fear of wasting his soldiers in hopeless fighting, though, Hamilton wasted them by not fighting.
With the collapse of the Entente armies in Serbia, everything began to unravel. Joffres masterstroke had to be abandoned, as the Italians and French in the Alps suddenly found themselves to be extremely exposed. Linsingen and Seeckt mounted their own attack in the Gap of Ljubljana in early April, targeting the Italian formations to isolate the French. It did not say anything good about Italian military capacity that the Germans tactics worked swimmingly. The military catastrophe referred to by the Germans as the Battle of Cilli saw Italian troops, already unnerved by jäger attacks and by the unforgiving climate of an Alpine winter, break completely. Two of Sarrails French divisions were cut off and forced to surrender as well. It was on the retreat from Cilli that everything went to hell, though. The Italian army, rather like that of the Serbs, virtually disintegrated, leaving Sarrails French and a few of Armando Diazs scattered divisions as the only guardians of northern Italy. At the Austrian high command in Vienna (Armee Oberkommando, or AOK), Conrad pressed for an all-out pursuit, despite the need for Austrian troops to restore order within the empire itself. He got his wish, as the Germans and Austrians pushed further. League forces had recaptured Trieste and Trent by early June, and were standing on the Piave a few weeks later.
Confronted with Germans, Austrians, and Russians on three sides, the outnumbered Romanians attempted to go the way of King Konstantinos in April 1918 and back the League up in exchange for not being utterly wiped out. This was, of course, after Dimitrievs Russians had already captured Iasi, and only a few days before the Austrians reentered Kronstadt. Franz Ferdinand demanded that the offer be ignored, but the Russians, interested in gaining some Balkan leverage, held the reins, and they were more than willing to act as Romanias protectors against the Austrians. The more aggressive party in Vienna was left to fume about the Russians denying them the fruits of their victory, while the more pragmatic ones, like Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, fumed at how the hawks had successfully dropped Romania into Russias lap after being handed a perfect opportunity for reconciliation on a silver platter. At any rate, Austria did manage to get several concessions on specific issues in the armistice, with broad hints at more significant ones in a formal treaty.
In early summer, there was something of a pause. The Three Emperors League had reached quite far in the last few months. Twelfth Army was at Ni, preparing to plunge into Macedonia and Bulgaria. Dimitrievs Front was standing on the Danube, backed up by the so-called Austrian Third Army of Adolf von Brudermann. Dankls Austrians and Linsingens Eleventh Army were standing on the Piave, preparing to plunge into northern Italy. And Vazov had begun to make his move already, as Ottoman troops pulled out of Romania and towards a defensible line in the Rhodope Mountains. The Bulgarian beachhead had been widened significantly and had already made contact with Russian Cossacks. Sofia was still in Greco-Turkish hands, albeit extremely tenuously. The Leagues combat power was, however, considerably decreased by the need to keep Austrian troops on partisan control operations, especially when Petar ivković resurfaced in Serbia and Bosnia at the head of a sizable partisan force. The Serbs briefly recaptured Belgrade in late May, spurring serious reprisals. More darkly, the Austrian troops also had to be detached from the front lines to conduct mass murders of Hungarians and Serbs in many places around the former Kingdom of Hungary (which was officially dissolved). Whether these were ever officially sanctioned by Vienna remains a hotly debated topic to this day.
The Ententes leaders did not sit idly by as their troops Balkan positions collapsed. But the fall of Budapest did spur a shakeup in both Britains and Frances command structures. The Doumergue government, a long-lasting one by the standards of the Third Republic, finally collapsed in February, depriving Joffre of the protection of Messimy. Alexandre Millerand managed to gather enough Socialist support to add to the Poincaré-loyal Right in the Chamber of Deputies to form a fresh government, but the price was the dismissal of Joffre, who was replaced at GQG by Foch on March 11. Robertson was similarly Lloyd Georges scapegoat; the PM wanted to replace him with Sir John French but French declined, partly out of ongoing opposition to the governments Ulster policy, and remained in overall command in Iran and Central Asia. Instead, General Sir Archibald Murray was tapped to be the CIGS. Effectively, he was a conduit for Kitchener, who now attempted to run both mobilization and planning. The ultimate effect of this shuffling was to unhinge any plans for counterattack. However, Foch did have a lot of manpower with which to play, and, now that he was replacing Joffre, goodwill sufficient to use it. He therefore planned a diversionary attack on Liège for the first week in July to hopefully draw the Germans into a long slugging match. The French would seize control of key heights in the neighborhood of the fortress and then permit the Germans and Belgians to waste their manpower trying to recapture them, thus weakening the forces in the Balkans. It was an exceedingly cunning plan, but the implementation was flawed, and most of the French troops never reached those commanding heights and instead got stuck in long slogging attacks that made scant progress. Foch called off the attacks in late July before casualties could mount, having managed to draw off a portion of the German reserves, but not nearly enough to justify a continued assault.
The early spring of 1918 also saw the final end of the long and bloody Zhili campaign. Since September of the previous year, the ANZACs, British, Chinese, and Japanese had engaged in more or less static fighting as the casualties mounted, with Hunter-Weston unwilling to take the potentially career-ending step of ordering a retreat. Not ordering a retreat, as it turned out, did equal harm to his career, as he was sacked in favor of the Australian John Monash a sop to antipodean opinion after the bloodletting in Tianjin in January. Monash executed a near-flawless retreat two months later, ending a campaign that had cost the Entente powers over a quarter million casualties. As the Republicans and Japanese struggled to reorganize their battered armies, the other great German army, Falkenhayns (technically Eighth and Ninth Armies, but sometimes mystifyingly referred to colloquially as the China-Korps), went into action. Ever since Jiangs great Spring Offensive, Falkenhayn had wanted to push the Republicans back from the Huanghe, correctly presuming that the Zhengzhou salient posed the greatest threat to the Qing; by comparison, the bloody Jiangsu and Chengdu campaigns were sideshows. Until 1918, though, the Entente had been able to keep up enough pressure to prevent Falkenhayn from launching the attack that Yuan Shikais government needed to survive.
When the Germans finally did step off on April 26, they went into action using an unusual albeit Falkenhayn-patented strategy. Close cooperation between infantry and artillery batteries was the key: heavy artillery would batter a Republican position to pieces and support the infantry in a breakthrough battle, whereupon the Republicans would retreat. Then the infantry would advance slowly to the next Chinese position, permitting the heavy artillery to keep up, rinse, and repeat. Instead of a single large battle, followed by a pursuit, it relied on a series of individual breakthrough engagements, in which the Republicans would be ground up bit by bit. It was a strategy that relied less on the potential of a huge payoff than the certainty of inflicting massive amounts of casualties.
The Falkenhayn Offensive, sometimes referred to as the Zhongyuan or Central Plains Campaign, put these principles to work beautifully. It was preceded by a series of diversionary offensives in Jiangsu designed to tie down the Republican reserves; opponents of Falkenhayn later argued that these offensives wasted troops that couldve been put to use in the decisive sector, but they ignore that the sector only became decisive through the use of those diversionary attacks. At any rate, within hours of the main attack at Zhengzhou on May 2, the local Republican forces, commanded by Li Liejun, had been ground down and forced to evacuate Zhengzhous vital railroad center. Over the next three weeks, Falkenhayns Germans drove the Republicans further and further back, pulling flanking units along with them, until the entire front began to collapse in slow motion. Jiang, who had had his headquarters at Xuchang, was close enough to the breakthrough sector to try to manage the situation, but was unable to pull in sufficient reserves to staunch the gap in the Chinese lines. Eventually, the entire Henan salient that Jiangs troops held deflated. Though Jiang managed to preserve Xiangfan and Hefei, pretty much everything to the north was lost, as well as the key positions in the Qinling Mountains. Worse, the Zhongyuan Campaign had effectively destroyed the Republican army as a serious fighting force capable of offensive action. Every few days, Falkenhayns Germans forced a new breakthrough, causing thousands of casualties for only a few of their own then they would let the Chinese form a new line, and do it all over again. Between April 26 and July 18, Jiangs army lost a staggering two and a half million casualties in the fighting, nearly a million of which were captured. By any estimate, the Zhongyuan Campaign was one of the greatest military victories in history.
It was mirrored by Brusilovs offensive further north in Manchuria in August. With the release of Kornilovs army from the Zhili front, Brusilov had the wherewithal to launch a fresh attack on the Japanese in their positions on the Yalu. Tanaka Giichi, who had succeeded Oku as head of the Japanese armies in Korea, was similarly reinforced, but not to the same degree that the Russians were. Pursuing a modified variant of standard infantry tactics that relied on specially trained infantry, or as the Germans called them, Sturmtruppen, combined with short, sharp, violent, and well-directed artillery bombardments (making the most of the limited resources available on the wrong end of the TSR), Brusilov again cut large holes in the Japanese front and forced Tanaka to withdraw behind the Yalu. Japanese resistance stiffened again, and the fight was in too tight a space to permit the kind of breakthrough battles Falkenhayn was waging on the Central Plains, so again the Russians cut off the offensive. Out of sheer frustration if nothing else, the IJN followed the battles of the Yalu up by bombarding Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky, underscoring both Japans naval supremacy in the Pacific and their utter inability to make use of any of it.
1918 had thus far been a bit of an annus mirabilis for the Three Emperors League, and although the rest of the year didnt quite live up to the promise of spring and early summer, things still went exceedingly well by OHLs calculations. The liberation of Bulgaria was kicked off on September 2 by a civilian rising in Sofia, which the Ottoman and Venizelist troops in the city didnt even bother to contest. Twelfth Army followed it up by pursuing the British down the Vardar River to Thessaloniki, which fell remarkably quickly. Hamilton had pulled the Fourth Army out of the Balkans rather precipitately when the balloon went up due partly to his own caution and partly to Murrays insistence that Fourth Army not be trapped and captured. As Konstantinos and his army moved south to try conclusions with the Venizelist levies each side backed by roughly a corps of British or German troops Twelfth Army spread out, supporting Ahmed Bey Zogus coup in Albania and marching on Constantinople with the Russians and Bulgarians. The fall of Constantinople ahem, Tsargrad at that point was almost a foregone conclusion. Most of the Ottoman armies in Europe had either disintegrated on the long retreat south from Romania and Bulgaria or had surrendered outright. The tsar himself had gone to Edirne to take official command of the army as a proper sovereign once again leaving government in Petersburg in the hands of the tsarina, which usually wasnt a very good idea. A few divisions of British troops from Fourth Army were hastily landed to try to stiffen Mustafa Kemals veterans in defending the Lines of Çatalca, but they were simply overwhelmed, and during the night of 21 September most of them were withdrawn across the Bosphorus. The next day,the tsars Dimitrievs multinational army marched into Constantinople to the general acclaim of the Orthodox world, capturing a significant portion of the CUP and some of the Ottoman cabinet.
In Italy, the Liberal government took a serious beating in late August when Luzzatti himself was shot by an anarchist in Milan. This was apparently the signal for a general uprising in Rome, which was successfully crushed by Armando Diaz. Diaz assumed effectively military-dictatorial powers and brought back Giolitti to formally head up the government. This, of course, spawned a fresh outbreak of rioting in the north. With Italys few remaining troops caught between the Germans on the Piave and the rioters in the streets, neither was effectively suppressed. Sarrails French were interested in little more, at this point, than guarding the back door into southern France, and successfully held down Piedmont. But Venice fell first to a group of communards, and then, eight days later, to Dankls Austrians; scarcely a month after Luzzatti was assassinated, Linsingens Germans were lobbing artillery shells across the Adda into Milan itself. A fresh uprising kicked off in Sicily in the first week of October, followed by antiwar rioting in Rome led by members of the Italian Syndicalist Union, while elements of the army deserted to form the paramilitary right-wing nationalist Arditi, which counted among their numbers the journalist Benito Mussolini. In short, Italy effectively ceased to exist from about mid-October 1918; if anything replaced it, it was the Italian Socialist Republic that Giacinto Serrati and other Italian socialists and syndicalists proclaimed Rome on October 18, which controlled much of central Italy but little else.
Greece, briefly the focus of attention at the beginning of the year, had devolved into a sideshow by the end. Konstantinos spent the fall maneuvering against the Venizelist forces arrayed in central Greece. On November 29, he made his move, smashing through Konstantinos Niders cordon near Livanátai. By December 2, royalist columns had reached Athens, and a French squadron had gone to the Piraeus to evacuate prominent Venizelists. Venizelos himself escaped to Crete to set up a republican government in Heraklion, protected by the French fleet and most of the Greek Navy (brought over by naval hero Pavlos Kountouriotis). In Athens itself, the royalists inaugurated the December Days (Dekemvriana) by massacring hundreds of suspected republicans, while other units fanned out to secure the Peloponnese. Konstantinos formally dissolved the parliament, and rewrote the constitution to begin the so-called autokratia. By years end, the royalists had a firm grip on mainland Greece and Euboea, but that was as far as their reach extended. The Aegean was a republican playground.
With the completion of the fourth Bayern-class Dreadnought, SMS Sachsen, in June 1918, the Germans and Russians were spoiling for a fight in the North Sea. They got their opportunity after an Anglo-Danish crisis over the blockade helped the German government finally coerce Carl Theodor Zahles Danish government into cobelligerence. With the Belts opened, the Russians and Germans sailed out into the Skagerrak and encountered Sturdees hastily rebuilt Grand Fleet off Cape Lindesnes in the late afternoon of August 2. Warned by Room 40 intelligence now effectively transmitted to the rest of the fleet via Jellicoes new naval planning staff the British had a pretty good idea as to where the Russo-German fleet was, but initial contact was hard to establish in the dying light. Around 1900Z, Hippers battlecruisers encountered Pakenhams; the British turned around and headed for the Grand Fleets main body to try to draw the Germans onto Sturdees heavy guns, while Hipper willingly took the bait so he could lead the German battle squadrons in. When the German battlecruisers ran across the entire Grand Fleet, Hippers ships spent a tense hour evading British fire until Admiral Wilhelm von Lens First Battle Squadron showed up. Scheer had one ace in the hole: the Russians, whose wireless code was known to not have been broken by Room 40 (which, unknown to the Germans, didnt even have a Russian linguist on staff). Essens battle squadrons were to establish where the Grand Fleet was, then steam ahead and cross the British T to turn a full broadside against them.
As the Germans and British began trading long-range shots from Dreadnought to Dreadnought, Essens Russians steamed around at full speed in the dying light and managed to get ahead of the British. The light, however, rapidly became a problem, for as the sun set Essens Russians only had a few minutes of time in which the British would be silhouetted before it got dark. While Essens timing was good, and the Russian opening salvo devastating, it hit the wrong targets. Most of Sturdees Dreadnoughts got off scot free; it was the British cruisers who took the brunt of the blow. HMS Defence was the unfortunate target of three separate Russian Dreadnoughts, and blew up after less than half an hour of pounding. Sturdee lucked out: the Russians didnt have enough light to keep firing and his battle squadrons were able to escape.
Now cognizant of his tactical position (bad), Sturdee turned back to try to escape. A German minefield, however, forced the Grand Fleet to turn south, back towards the combined battle fleets. The British could reasonably have hoped to still evade the Germans and Russians with the cover of darkness, but Scheer had air cover - namely, Zeppelins armed with wirelesses - which were able to discern the British position at about 0130Z and notify the admiral. With the Zeppelins as spotters, Scheer managed to array the allied battle lines to cross the British T again. Of the three navies off Cape Lindesnes, the Germans were the best at night fighting, having done significant amounts of prewar gunnery practice in bad weather against moving targets at varying times of the day and night. Sturdee was all too aware of this, and again turned away as soon as possible when the Russo-German fleet opened fire again a little after 0300Z. What was apparently a lucky shot caused a turret explosion on HMS Warspite that broke the Dreadnought in half; Sturdees cruisers suffered heavy damage as well. But once again the Grand Fleets speed came in handy, and the British were able to peel away from the slower Russian and German warships.
The Grand Fleets ordeal was far from over, though. Scheers U-boats were out in force, and one of them torpedoed HMS Princess Royal, one of Pakenhams battlecruisers. The panic turn that ensued drove Sturdees battle squadrons onto a minefield that his destroyers had, unaccountably, missed. All efforts to direct the British vessels to safety foundered on poor signaling and the nonexistent light. Part of the Germans reasoning behind the U-boat attacks of 1917 had been to figure out the patterns that the Royal Navy followed when evading submarines and minefields, and the U-boat commanders used this knowledge to formulate new mining tactics. The result was chaos; two more Dreadnoughts, one of them a Queen Elizabeth-class, sank with horrific loss of life, while Pakenham lost another cruiser. Sturdee was unable to gain effective command over the entire fleet, leaving individual squadrons to struggle into port on their own; several Dreadnoughts made for Rosyth, the battlecruiser anchorage, instead of Scapa, inflicting the most humiliating loss of all when HMS Colossus rammed a destroyer in the predawn light, HMS Spitfire, sinking the destroyer (it was recovered a few months later) and causing several hundred casualties.
What became known as the Battle of the Three Navies wasnt exactly a walkover victory for Scheers High Seas Fleet. German submarines had savaged the Grand Fleet, but British destroyers and submarines had done sterling work against the Germans and Russians in the confusion at the Skagerrak as the two fleets headed back to port. SMS Baden, one of the new superdreadnoughts, was put out of action for the remainder of the war when it rammed a British destroyer and fired panic shots at less than twenty yards range, blowing the superstructure off the destroyer (HMS Sparrowhawk) and causing severe damage to its own hull in the process. Hipper lost two battlecruisers, Derfflinger and Von der Tann (the first in the initial action off Cape Lindesnes, the second by accidentally striking a mine in the Helgoland Bight). Three of the German predreadnoughts, the five-minute ships as the Germans called them (for how long they would last in a stand-up fight against the Royal Navy), were sunk in the nighttime melee after Sturdees battle turn. Essens flagship, Petropavlovsk, was torpedoed near the entrance to the Belts by a British submarine and lost; the admiral was one of the dead. All of the Russian battleships suffered serious damage and after the engagement it was reckoned that only one of them was sufficiently seaworthy to fight again within the next six months. And, again, both sides sustained serious losses to their cruisers. But the British were clearly worsted, especially from the disastrous panic turn. In addition to the lives lost in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand nearly irreplaceable seamen a total of three Dreadnoughts lost, several cruisers sunk, at least half again that number put out of commission for the foreseeable future. The Grand Fleet was effectively crippled. In the aftermath of the engagement, Jellicoe categorically stated that the Royal Navy could not both maintain an effective blockade in the North Sea and continue to protect the British coastline, and requested (and got) the withdrawal of the cruiser squadron that was patrolling the North Sea exits. Several armed merchantmen remained in place, but they could not cover the entire stretch between Norway and Scotland. Officially if not effectively the blockade of Germany was over.
Of course, the Germans could hardly expect the kind of transport volume that they had enjoyed in times of peace. Individual vessels were highly vulnerable, and none of the German staff thought that convoy was a good idea. Blockade runners could get through, but they didnt carry sufficient volume to do much of anything with regard to Germanys economic situation. What arrived in German ports was a trickle if it was anything. But there were other opportunities available. While the end of the blockade made for great propaganda in Germany itself, the actual effect was not to increase the amount of food or resources available but instead to permit the Germans to ship things out namely, weapons. Their recipient: the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had been engaging in on-and-off terrorism for the past few years. Lloyd George, afraid of alienating either Liberals or Tories, had avoided a decision on Home Rule just as Asquith had done, and left the actual implementation up to later (later presumably meaning the end of the war). It turned out to have disastrous results. On August 31, equipped with a motley collection of German and self-owned small arms and possessing a German 76 mm field gun, several hundred UVF paramilitaries stormed the city center of Londonderry and demanded that the Home Rule Act be repealed. The Unionist-dominated Royal Irish Constabulary was entirely unprepared to deal with artillery, especially since it was wielded by Orangeman cohorts. Lloyd George made vague promises about Amending Bills while ordering elements of two divisions to Belfast; the UVF got there first and took control of the citys armory, gaining even more heavy weapons, and mass defections from the RIC began. Desperately, Lloyd George tried to ram an Amending Bill through the Commons to abolish the Irish Parliament-to-be, promising indeterminate concessions to Redmond and the Nationalists, but the Irish, Labour, and Liberals wouldnt have it. A day before the final vote, on September 14, an unidentified gunman murdered Henry Wilson, the noted general staff officer and Ulsterman, who was reportedly acting as an intermediary between the government and the UVF. With Wilson dead, the bill went down in flames, and Lloyd George ordered three army corps from the Fourth Army, which had withdrawn from Thessaloniki a few days before, to ship for Dublin to quell the rebellion.
The last Entente power to suffer a domestic-political collapse and rebellion was the Republic of China. Falkenhayns Central Plains Campaign had been the perfect opportunity for Sun to take Jiang down a peg. On August 17, Sun fired Jiang and removed him as generalissimo of the Republican Army; the Guomindang easily passed a resolution in the National Assembly in support. Jiang, however, did not come quietly. He had strong ties with Japanese agents who believed that a proper dictator would provide a much more stable and quiescent southern China than would the dangerously nationalist Nationalists. He had strong backing in the army, which he had filled with his cronies over the past several years of war. None of them particularly relished the idea of Sun, who knew little about military affairs and who was their outspoken political enemy, taking personal control of the army; all knew it was sure to happen, so that he could effect a purge of anybody Jiang had put into prominence. Backed by two army corps, Jiang marched on Nanjing, declaring that the Guomindang was seeking to establish a dictatorship and lose the war. The rhetoric didnt make much sense, but it didnt need to: it kept everybody confused while Jiang and his loyalists stormed the capital and seized control of the National Assembly. Hundreds of Guomindang members were shot, including Song Jiaoren; thousands more fled into exile. Sun himself managed to escape to the United States with his wife and several companions but died of pneumonia in the winter of 1918-9 in Washington, DC, while preparing to address the American Congress.
As matters stood in the winter of 1918, the Three Emperors League and its allies had won the war. Italy had collapsed, while the Ottoman Empire was in the process of doing so. The Balkan alliance had fallen apart, with the Greek republicans exiled to the Aegean islands and Petar ivković executed by an Austrian firing squad in November. China was in the throes of a fresh upheaval, with Jiang attempting to solidify his control in the face of pro-Guomindang uprisings in Yunnan. The British were embroiled in a massive political crisis and faced with rebellion in Ireland. Only France and Japan remained on their feet, and both countries were shaky.
Economically, the Entente powers were losing steam fast. The British had controlled the worlds best financial system before the war started, but had also had the greatest need for it. Confidence in the British economy sustained French and Japanese domestic borrowing, which accounted for the greater portion of their financial support. But the British were running low on their reserves of foreign currency by 1918, exhausted at trying to fuel Kitcheners expertly-constructed war economy with American-purchased materials. Reginald McKenna, Lloyd Georges Chancellor of the Exchequer, warned that war could not be sustained another full year at the rate the British were depleting their reserves of dollars. And with the British appearing increasingly shaky, the French and Japanese were almost certainly going to run into budgetary problems soon.
But there seemed to be no clear way of stopping the German colossus. It would take, some believed, an act of God to reverse the tide of the war. Foch, with characteristic insouciance, was preparing his newest reserve, assembled from the 1921 and 1922 conscript classes, for yet another attack on the Western Front, counting on the disorder in Italy, the Balkans, and the Middle East to keep the Germans distracted. The Japanese were out of ideas, but placed their faith in Tanaka Giichi to somehow spot a weak point in Brusilovs formidable steel curtain. Secretly, the IJN began preparing a plan to seize Port Arthur directly in the event of most desperate straits.
The Entente did not get an act of God in January 1919. What it did get was the January Revolution. For Russia, too, had had many problems in gearing itself to fight a total war. Russian industry was experiencing record growth, fueled by wartime spending, true enough. Russian production of the stuff of war guns, shells, bullets, uniforms, and the like exceeded all powers except Germanys and Britains. But the tsarist governments capacity to raise money to fuel all this was worse than any other powers. The alliance with Germany had not helped matters, for Germanys capital was less liquid than that of France, providing fewer ready loans for the Russian war effort. Domestic borrowing was a joke, even more so without a parliament worth the name to facilitate such a loan and lend it extra legitimacy. Russias government was, fiscally, at its wits end by the winter of 1918-9. The bureaucracy, despite the best efforts of men like Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin, was a shambles. Even though Russia could produce what its armies and population needed, it was incapable of getting the goods to the right places. Meanwhile, dissent had been constantly rising when the early promise of the war began to seem like a damp squib. The number and size of strikes, which had been on the rise before the war, dipped in 1915 but crept up again until they were at an all-time high by 1918. The Socialist Revolutionaries (the near-mythical SRs, or eSeRs) were gaining in strength and organization once again, as were a multitude of other, smaller cells and organizations, many of which were assisted by French, British, and Japanese agents. Nikolais increasing distance from his people and he was distant at the best of times and his choice to spend his time at his cousins stavka in Moscow or on naval maneuvers with the Germans or foppishly following the army around in the Near East grated with many. The tsarina ran the government when he was gone, and she was widely despised, on the basis of both untrue rumors and true ones, many of which circulated around the enigmatic figure of the mystical Rasputin, whose shadow still hung over Petersburg even though he had been murdered a year before.
And finally, the Russian government seemed to be incapable of gaining a Victory. Oh, sure, there were lesser victories. Manchuria was held, as was Beijing, and the Russians were holding their ground in Iran and the Caucasus. Tsargrad had been captured, with Nikolai II himself at the head of the army. But even with the capital of the Ottoman Empire in their hands, the tsarist government seemed incapable of bringing the war to a close. None of Russias enemies, not even the weak Constitutionalists, had been forced out of the war. Russian soldiers continued to march to their deaths on faraway battlefields. Victory was said to be near, yes but that was what the tsarists had said in 1916, when the Japanese were defeated in Manchuria.
Lack of Victory meant more requisitions; more requisitions, after the abominably bad harvest of 1918, meant even worse shortages than usual. The requisitions had already touched off several insurgencies in the countryside in November and December, organized in large part by the omnipresent SRs. And the shortages finally caused a series of bread riots in Petersburg on January 4 (old style; January 17 by the Gregorian calendar). The next day, the rioters, most of whom were women, were joined by students and most of the citys garrison (which also didnt receive a lot of food, and at any rate hadnt been paid recently). The students had been mostly interested in demonstrating, but eventually started looting the houses and shops on the Nevsky Prospekt. The local commanders ordered in Cossacks, and a running battle soon erupted in the streets which saw the imperial troops worsted. Meanwhile, mutinying sailors seized the Kronstadt naval base and threatened to train the guns of the Gulf of Finland defense squadron on the city, the Baltic Fleet having been moved to Riga. With the Kronstadt soldiers and sailors leading the way, the Petersburg rebels forced their way into the Winter Palace; finding no one there but the staff, they made for Tsarskoye Selo, where they surprised the guards and captured the tsarina and most of the royal family, who were duly executed to the shock of the entire world. Within three days, the tsarists had evacuated the capital. With the SR ideologue Viktor Chernov in the lead, the rebels formed a provisional government for a new Russian Republic and immediately called for more uprisings and a levée en masse.
The tsar, who had been hearing mass in the Hagia Sophia when he was told of the January 5 uprising and the murder of his entire family, flew into a rage and ordered Dimitriev to march north to restore order, leaving Anatolia to the Germans; the army in the Caucasus was similarly ordered to halt and attack north. That probably wouldve been the end of it, if the revolution had been confined to St. Petersburg renamed Petrograd by Chernovs new and decidedly anti-German government. But, of course, it wasnt; most of the Great Russian countryside was aflame, although Moscow remained under tsarist control. And nationalist rebellions were popping up all over the place. In Warsaw, Polish deserters declared a Polish Republic, and Finns did the same in Helsinki; in Central Asia, to Envers eternal joy, a massive Basmachi uprising ignited, resulting in the murder of Russias Turkestan governor, Samsonov; in the Caucasus, tens of uprisings started, a confusing blend of nationalism, socialism, and Islam; in Mongolia and Uighuristan, a Ma uprising drove out the Russian garrison and established a new republic at Ürümqi; in Ukraine, a sizable anarchist army coalesced from various preexisting rebel bands, led by Nestor Makhno, with the ideological support (and personal attendance) of Kropotkin himself.
When the Germans finally did step off on April 26, they went into action using an unusual albeit Falkenhayn-patented strategy. Close cooperation between infantry and artillery batteries was the key: heavy artillery would batter a Republican position to pieces and support the infantry in a breakthrough battle, whereupon the Republicans would retreat. Then the infantry would advance slowly to the next Chinese position, permitting the heavy artillery to keep up, rinse, and repeat. Instead of a single large battle, followed by a pursuit, it relied on a series of individual breakthrough engagements, in which the Republicans would be ground up bit by bit. It was a strategy that relied less on the potential of a huge payoff than the certainty of inflicting massive amounts of casualties.
The Falkenhayn Offensive, sometimes referred to as the Zhongyuan or Central Plains Campaign, put these principles to work beautifully. It was preceded by a series of diversionary offensives in Jiangsu designed to tie down the Republican reserves; opponents of Falkenhayn later argued that these offensives wasted troops that couldve been put to use in the decisive sector, but they ignore that the sector only became decisive through the use of those diversionary attacks. At any rate, within hours of the main attack at Zhengzhou on May 2, the local Republican forces, commanded by Li Liejun, had been ground down and forced to evacuate Zhengzhous vital railroad center. Over the next three weeks, Falkenhayns Germans drove the Republicans further and further back, pulling flanking units along with them, until the entire front began to collapse in slow motion. Jiang, who had had his headquarters at Xuchang, was close enough to the breakthrough sector to try to manage the situation, but was unable to pull in sufficient reserves to staunch the gap in the Chinese lines. Eventually, the entire Henan salient that Jiangs troops held deflated. Though Jiang managed to preserve Xiangfan and Hefei, pretty much everything to the north was lost, as well as the key positions in the Qinling Mountains. Worse, the Zhongyuan Campaign had effectively destroyed the Republican army as a serious fighting force capable of offensive action. Every few days, Falkenhayns Germans forced a new breakthrough, causing thousands of casualties for only a few of their own then they would let the Chinese form a new line, and do it all over again. Between April 26 and July 18, Jiangs army lost a staggering two and a half million casualties in the fighting, nearly a million of which were captured. By any estimate, the Zhongyuan Campaign was one of the greatest military victories in history.
It was mirrored by Brusilovs offensive further north in Manchuria in August. With the release of Kornilovs army from the Zhili front, Brusilov had the wherewithal to launch a fresh attack on the Japanese in their positions on the Yalu. Tanaka Giichi, who had succeeded Oku as head of the Japanese armies in Korea, was similarly reinforced, but not to the same degree that the Russians were. Pursuing a modified variant of standard infantry tactics that relied on specially trained infantry, or as the Germans called them, Sturmtruppen, combined with short, sharp, violent, and well-directed artillery bombardments (making the most of the limited resources available on the wrong end of the TSR), Brusilov again cut large holes in the Japanese front and forced Tanaka to withdraw behind the Yalu. Japanese resistance stiffened again, and the fight was in too tight a space to permit the kind of breakthrough battles Falkenhayn was waging on the Central Plains, so again the Russians cut off the offensive. Out of sheer frustration if nothing else, the IJN followed the battles of the Yalu up by bombarding Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky, underscoring both Japans naval supremacy in the Pacific and their utter inability to make use of any of it.
1918 had thus far been a bit of an annus mirabilis for the Three Emperors League, and although the rest of the year didnt quite live up to the promise of spring and early summer, things still went exceedingly well by OHLs calculations. The liberation of Bulgaria was kicked off on September 2 by a civilian rising in Sofia, which the Ottoman and Venizelist troops in the city didnt even bother to contest. Twelfth Army followed it up by pursuing the British down the Vardar River to Thessaloniki, which fell remarkably quickly. Hamilton had pulled the Fourth Army out of the Balkans rather precipitately when the balloon went up due partly to his own caution and partly to Murrays insistence that Fourth Army not be trapped and captured. As Konstantinos and his army moved south to try conclusions with the Venizelist levies each side backed by roughly a corps of British or German troops Twelfth Army spread out, supporting Ahmed Bey Zogus coup in Albania and marching on Constantinople with the Russians and Bulgarians. The fall of Constantinople ahem, Tsargrad at that point was almost a foregone conclusion. Most of the Ottoman armies in Europe had either disintegrated on the long retreat south from Romania and Bulgaria or had surrendered outright. The tsar himself had gone to Edirne to take official command of the army as a proper sovereign once again leaving government in Petersburg in the hands of the tsarina, which usually wasnt a very good idea. A few divisions of British troops from Fourth Army were hastily landed to try to stiffen Mustafa Kemals veterans in defending the Lines of Çatalca, but they were simply overwhelmed, and during the night of 21 September most of them were withdrawn across the Bosphorus. The next day,
In Italy, the Liberal government took a serious beating in late August when Luzzatti himself was shot by an anarchist in Milan. This was apparently the signal for a general uprising in Rome, which was successfully crushed by Armando Diaz. Diaz assumed effectively military-dictatorial powers and brought back Giolitti to formally head up the government. This, of course, spawned a fresh outbreak of rioting in the north. With Italys few remaining troops caught between the Germans on the Piave and the rioters in the streets, neither was effectively suppressed. Sarrails French were interested in little more, at this point, than guarding the back door into southern France, and successfully held down Piedmont. But Venice fell first to a group of communards, and then, eight days later, to Dankls Austrians; scarcely a month after Luzzatti was assassinated, Linsingens Germans were lobbing artillery shells across the Adda into Milan itself. A fresh uprising kicked off in Sicily in the first week of October, followed by antiwar rioting in Rome led by members of the Italian Syndicalist Union, while elements of the army deserted to form the paramilitary right-wing nationalist Arditi, which counted among their numbers the journalist Benito Mussolini. In short, Italy effectively ceased to exist from about mid-October 1918; if anything replaced it, it was the Italian Socialist Republic that Giacinto Serrati and other Italian socialists and syndicalists proclaimed Rome on October 18, which controlled much of central Italy but little else.
Greece, briefly the focus of attention at the beginning of the year, had devolved into a sideshow by the end. Konstantinos spent the fall maneuvering against the Venizelist forces arrayed in central Greece. On November 29, he made his move, smashing through Konstantinos Niders cordon near Livanátai. By December 2, royalist columns had reached Athens, and a French squadron had gone to the Piraeus to evacuate prominent Venizelists. Venizelos himself escaped to Crete to set up a republican government in Heraklion, protected by the French fleet and most of the Greek Navy (brought over by naval hero Pavlos Kountouriotis). In Athens itself, the royalists inaugurated the December Days (Dekemvriana) by massacring hundreds of suspected republicans, while other units fanned out to secure the Peloponnese. Konstantinos formally dissolved the parliament, and rewrote the constitution to begin the so-called autokratia. By years end, the royalists had a firm grip on mainland Greece and Euboea, but that was as far as their reach extended. The Aegean was a republican playground.
With the completion of the fourth Bayern-class Dreadnought, SMS Sachsen, in June 1918, the Germans and Russians were spoiling for a fight in the North Sea. They got their opportunity after an Anglo-Danish crisis over the blockade helped the German government finally coerce Carl Theodor Zahles Danish government into cobelligerence. With the Belts opened, the Russians and Germans sailed out into the Skagerrak and encountered Sturdees hastily rebuilt Grand Fleet off Cape Lindesnes in the late afternoon of August 2. Warned by Room 40 intelligence now effectively transmitted to the rest of the fleet via Jellicoes new naval planning staff the British had a pretty good idea as to where the Russo-German fleet was, but initial contact was hard to establish in the dying light. Around 1900Z, Hippers battlecruisers encountered Pakenhams; the British turned around and headed for the Grand Fleets main body to try to draw the Germans onto Sturdees heavy guns, while Hipper willingly took the bait so he could lead the German battle squadrons in. When the German battlecruisers ran across the entire Grand Fleet, Hippers ships spent a tense hour evading British fire until Admiral Wilhelm von Lens First Battle Squadron showed up. Scheer had one ace in the hole: the Russians, whose wireless code was known to not have been broken by Room 40 (which, unknown to the Germans, didnt even have a Russian linguist on staff). Essens battle squadrons were to establish where the Grand Fleet was, then steam ahead and cross the British T to turn a full broadside against them.
As the Germans and British began trading long-range shots from Dreadnought to Dreadnought, Essens Russians steamed around at full speed in the dying light and managed to get ahead of the British. The light, however, rapidly became a problem, for as the sun set Essens Russians only had a few minutes of time in which the British would be silhouetted before it got dark. While Essens timing was good, and the Russian opening salvo devastating, it hit the wrong targets. Most of Sturdees Dreadnoughts got off scot free; it was the British cruisers who took the brunt of the blow. HMS Defence was the unfortunate target of three separate Russian Dreadnoughts, and blew up after less than half an hour of pounding. Sturdee lucked out: the Russians didnt have enough light to keep firing and his battle squadrons were able to escape.
Now cognizant of his tactical position (bad), Sturdee turned back to try to escape. A German minefield, however, forced the Grand Fleet to turn south, back towards the combined battle fleets. The British could reasonably have hoped to still evade the Germans and Russians with the cover of darkness, but Scheer had air cover - namely, Zeppelins armed with wirelesses - which were able to discern the British position at about 0130Z and notify the admiral. With the Zeppelins as spotters, Scheer managed to array the allied battle lines to cross the British T again. Of the three navies off Cape Lindesnes, the Germans were the best at night fighting, having done significant amounts of prewar gunnery practice in bad weather against moving targets at varying times of the day and night. Sturdee was all too aware of this, and again turned away as soon as possible when the Russo-German fleet opened fire again a little after 0300Z. What was apparently a lucky shot caused a turret explosion on HMS Warspite that broke the Dreadnought in half; Sturdees cruisers suffered heavy damage as well. But once again the Grand Fleets speed came in handy, and the British were able to peel away from the slower Russian and German warships.
The Grand Fleets ordeal was far from over, though. Scheers U-boats were out in force, and one of them torpedoed HMS Princess Royal, one of Pakenhams battlecruisers. The panic turn that ensued drove Sturdees battle squadrons onto a minefield that his destroyers had, unaccountably, missed. All efforts to direct the British vessels to safety foundered on poor signaling and the nonexistent light. Part of the Germans reasoning behind the U-boat attacks of 1917 had been to figure out the patterns that the Royal Navy followed when evading submarines and minefields, and the U-boat commanders used this knowledge to formulate new mining tactics. The result was chaos; two more Dreadnoughts, one of them a Queen Elizabeth-class, sank with horrific loss of life, while Pakenham lost another cruiser. Sturdee was unable to gain effective command over the entire fleet, leaving individual squadrons to struggle into port on their own; several Dreadnoughts made for Rosyth, the battlecruiser anchorage, instead of Scapa, inflicting the most humiliating loss of all when HMS Colossus rammed a destroyer in the predawn light, HMS Spitfire, sinking the destroyer (it was recovered a few months later) and causing several hundred casualties.
What became known as the Battle of the Three Navies wasnt exactly a walkover victory for Scheers High Seas Fleet. German submarines had savaged the Grand Fleet, but British destroyers and submarines had done sterling work against the Germans and Russians in the confusion at the Skagerrak as the two fleets headed back to port. SMS Baden, one of the new superdreadnoughts, was put out of action for the remainder of the war when it rammed a British destroyer and fired panic shots at less than twenty yards range, blowing the superstructure off the destroyer (HMS Sparrowhawk) and causing severe damage to its own hull in the process. Hipper lost two battlecruisers, Derfflinger and Von der Tann (the first in the initial action off Cape Lindesnes, the second by accidentally striking a mine in the Helgoland Bight). Three of the German predreadnoughts, the five-minute ships as the Germans called them (for how long they would last in a stand-up fight against the Royal Navy), were sunk in the nighttime melee after Sturdees battle turn. Essens flagship, Petropavlovsk, was torpedoed near the entrance to the Belts by a British submarine and lost; the admiral was one of the dead. All of the Russian battleships suffered serious damage and after the engagement it was reckoned that only one of them was sufficiently seaworthy to fight again within the next six months. And, again, both sides sustained serious losses to their cruisers. But the British were clearly worsted, especially from the disastrous panic turn. In addition to the lives lost in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand nearly irreplaceable seamen a total of three Dreadnoughts lost, several cruisers sunk, at least half again that number put out of commission for the foreseeable future. The Grand Fleet was effectively crippled. In the aftermath of the engagement, Jellicoe categorically stated that the Royal Navy could not both maintain an effective blockade in the North Sea and continue to protect the British coastline, and requested (and got) the withdrawal of the cruiser squadron that was patrolling the North Sea exits. Several armed merchantmen remained in place, but they could not cover the entire stretch between Norway and Scotland. Officially if not effectively the blockade of Germany was over.
Of course, the Germans could hardly expect the kind of transport volume that they had enjoyed in times of peace. Individual vessels were highly vulnerable, and none of the German staff thought that convoy was a good idea. Blockade runners could get through, but they didnt carry sufficient volume to do much of anything with regard to Germanys economic situation. What arrived in German ports was a trickle if it was anything. But there were other opportunities available. While the end of the blockade made for great propaganda in Germany itself, the actual effect was not to increase the amount of food or resources available but instead to permit the Germans to ship things out namely, weapons. Their recipient: the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had been engaging in on-and-off terrorism for the past few years. Lloyd George, afraid of alienating either Liberals or Tories, had avoided a decision on Home Rule just as Asquith had done, and left the actual implementation up to later (later presumably meaning the end of the war). It turned out to have disastrous results. On August 31, equipped with a motley collection of German and self-owned small arms and possessing a German 76 mm field gun, several hundred UVF paramilitaries stormed the city center of Londonderry and demanded that the Home Rule Act be repealed. The Unionist-dominated Royal Irish Constabulary was entirely unprepared to deal with artillery, especially since it was wielded by Orangeman cohorts. Lloyd George made vague promises about Amending Bills while ordering elements of two divisions to Belfast; the UVF got there first and took control of the citys armory, gaining even more heavy weapons, and mass defections from the RIC began. Desperately, Lloyd George tried to ram an Amending Bill through the Commons to abolish the Irish Parliament-to-be, promising indeterminate concessions to Redmond and the Nationalists, but the Irish, Labour, and Liberals wouldnt have it. A day before the final vote, on September 14, an unidentified gunman murdered Henry Wilson, the noted general staff officer and Ulsterman, who was reportedly acting as an intermediary between the government and the UVF. With Wilson dead, the bill went down in flames, and Lloyd George ordered three army corps from the Fourth Army, which had withdrawn from Thessaloniki a few days before, to ship for Dublin to quell the rebellion.
The last Entente power to suffer a domestic-political collapse and rebellion was the Republic of China. Falkenhayns Central Plains Campaign had been the perfect opportunity for Sun to take Jiang down a peg. On August 17, Sun fired Jiang and removed him as generalissimo of the Republican Army; the Guomindang easily passed a resolution in the National Assembly in support. Jiang, however, did not come quietly. He had strong ties with Japanese agents who believed that a proper dictator would provide a much more stable and quiescent southern China than would the dangerously nationalist Nationalists. He had strong backing in the army, which he had filled with his cronies over the past several years of war. None of them particularly relished the idea of Sun, who knew little about military affairs and who was their outspoken political enemy, taking personal control of the army; all knew it was sure to happen, so that he could effect a purge of anybody Jiang had put into prominence. Backed by two army corps, Jiang marched on Nanjing, declaring that the Guomindang was seeking to establish a dictatorship and lose the war. The rhetoric didnt make much sense, but it didnt need to: it kept everybody confused while Jiang and his loyalists stormed the capital and seized control of the National Assembly. Hundreds of Guomindang members were shot, including Song Jiaoren; thousands more fled into exile. Sun himself managed to escape to the United States with his wife and several companions but died of pneumonia in the winter of 1918-9 in Washington, DC, while preparing to address the American Congress.
As matters stood in the winter of 1918, the Three Emperors League and its allies had won the war. Italy had collapsed, while the Ottoman Empire was in the process of doing so. The Balkan alliance had fallen apart, with the Greek republicans exiled to the Aegean islands and Petar ivković executed by an Austrian firing squad in November. China was in the throes of a fresh upheaval, with Jiang attempting to solidify his control in the face of pro-Guomindang uprisings in Yunnan. The British were embroiled in a massive political crisis and faced with rebellion in Ireland. Only France and Japan remained on their feet, and both countries were shaky.
Economically, the Entente powers were losing steam fast. The British had controlled the worlds best financial system before the war started, but had also had the greatest need for it. Confidence in the British economy sustained French and Japanese domestic borrowing, which accounted for the greater portion of their financial support. But the British were running low on their reserves of foreign currency by 1918, exhausted at trying to fuel Kitcheners expertly-constructed war economy with American-purchased materials. Reginald McKenna, Lloyd Georges Chancellor of the Exchequer, warned that war could not be sustained another full year at the rate the British were depleting their reserves of dollars. And with the British appearing increasingly shaky, the French and Japanese were almost certainly going to run into budgetary problems soon.
But there seemed to be no clear way of stopping the German colossus. It would take, some believed, an act of God to reverse the tide of the war. Foch, with characteristic insouciance, was preparing his newest reserve, assembled from the 1921 and 1922 conscript classes, for yet another attack on the Western Front, counting on the disorder in Italy, the Balkans, and the Middle East to keep the Germans distracted. The Japanese were out of ideas, but placed their faith in Tanaka Giichi to somehow spot a weak point in Brusilovs formidable steel curtain. Secretly, the IJN began preparing a plan to seize Port Arthur directly in the event of most desperate straits.
The Entente did not get an act of God in January 1919. What it did get was the January Revolution. For Russia, too, had had many problems in gearing itself to fight a total war. Russian industry was experiencing record growth, fueled by wartime spending, true enough. Russian production of the stuff of war guns, shells, bullets, uniforms, and the like exceeded all powers except Germanys and Britains. But the tsarist governments capacity to raise money to fuel all this was worse than any other powers. The alliance with Germany had not helped matters, for Germanys capital was less liquid than that of France, providing fewer ready loans for the Russian war effort. Domestic borrowing was a joke, even more so without a parliament worth the name to facilitate such a loan and lend it extra legitimacy. Russias government was, fiscally, at its wits end by the winter of 1918-9. The bureaucracy, despite the best efforts of men like Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin, was a shambles. Even though Russia could produce what its armies and population needed, it was incapable of getting the goods to the right places. Meanwhile, dissent had been constantly rising when the early promise of the war began to seem like a damp squib. The number and size of strikes, which had been on the rise before the war, dipped in 1915 but crept up again until they were at an all-time high by 1918. The Socialist Revolutionaries (the near-mythical SRs, or eSeRs) were gaining in strength and organization once again, as were a multitude of other, smaller cells and organizations, many of which were assisted by French, British, and Japanese agents. Nikolais increasing distance from his people and he was distant at the best of times and his choice to spend his time at his cousins stavka in Moscow or on naval maneuvers with the Germans or foppishly following the army around in the Near East grated with many. The tsarina ran the government when he was gone, and she was widely despised, on the basis of both untrue rumors and true ones, many of which circulated around the enigmatic figure of the mystical Rasputin, whose shadow still hung over Petersburg even though he had been murdered a year before.
And finally, the Russian government seemed to be incapable of gaining a Victory. Oh, sure, there were lesser victories. Manchuria was held, as was Beijing, and the Russians were holding their ground in Iran and the Caucasus. Tsargrad had been captured, with Nikolai II himself at the head of the army. But even with the capital of the Ottoman Empire in their hands, the tsarist government seemed incapable of bringing the war to a close. None of Russias enemies, not even the weak Constitutionalists, had been forced out of the war. Russian soldiers continued to march to their deaths on faraway battlefields. Victory was said to be near, yes but that was what the tsarists had said in 1916, when the Japanese were defeated in Manchuria.
Lack of Victory meant more requisitions; more requisitions, after the abominably bad harvest of 1918, meant even worse shortages than usual. The requisitions had already touched off several insurgencies in the countryside in November and December, organized in large part by the omnipresent SRs. And the shortages finally caused a series of bread riots in Petersburg on January 4 (old style; January 17 by the Gregorian calendar). The next day, the rioters, most of whom were women, were joined by students and most of the citys garrison (which also didnt receive a lot of food, and at any rate hadnt been paid recently). The students had been mostly interested in demonstrating, but eventually started looting the houses and shops on the Nevsky Prospekt. The local commanders ordered in Cossacks, and a running battle soon erupted in the streets which saw the imperial troops worsted. Meanwhile, mutinying sailors seized the Kronstadt naval base and threatened to train the guns of the Gulf of Finland defense squadron on the city, the Baltic Fleet having been moved to Riga. With the Kronstadt soldiers and sailors leading the way, the Petersburg rebels forced their way into the Winter Palace; finding no one there but the staff, they made for Tsarskoye Selo, where they surprised the guards and captured the tsarina and most of the royal family, who were duly executed to the shock of the entire world. Within three days, the tsarists had evacuated the capital. With the SR ideologue Viktor Chernov in the lead, the rebels formed a provisional government for a new Russian Republic and immediately called for more uprisings and a levée en masse.
The tsar, who had been hearing mass in the Hagia Sophia when he was told of the January 5 uprising and the murder of his entire family, flew into a rage and ordered Dimitriev to march north to restore order, leaving Anatolia to the Germans; the army in the Caucasus was similarly ordered to halt and attack north. That probably wouldve been the end of it, if the revolution had been confined to St. Petersburg renamed Petrograd by Chernovs new and decidedly anti-German government. But, of course, it wasnt; most of the Great Russian countryside was aflame, although Moscow remained under tsarist control. And nationalist rebellions were popping up all over the place. In Warsaw, Polish deserters declared a Polish Republic, and Finns did the same in Helsinki; in Central Asia, to Envers eternal joy, a massive Basmachi uprising ignited, resulting in the murder of Russias Turkestan governor, Samsonov; in the Caucasus, tens of uprisings started, a confusing blend of nationalism, socialism, and Islam; in Mongolia and Uighuristan, a Ma uprising drove out the Russian garrison and established a new republic at Ürümqi; in Ukraine, a sizable anarchist army coalesced from various preexisting rebel bands, led by Nestor Makhno, with the ideological support (and personal attendance) of Kropotkin himself.
It was impossible for the tsarist military, as overextended as it was, to deal with all of these uprisings. Yudenich’s considerable skill was completely absorbed by the incredibly difficult task of keeping supply lines open in the Caucasus, much less restoring order. None of the other armies had it any easier. Brusilov’s Manchurian army was cannibalized to keep the TSR open, reducing it to only six army corps, easy prey for the Japanese. Dimitriev’s army ran into Makhno’s Black Armies and got bogged down almost immediately. Alekseyev’s army proved itself utterly incapable of figuring out how to quash the irrepressible Choiski, who was back in Azerbaijan after a brief exile. So, reluctantly, the tsar was forced to call on the Germans for aid. The Germans were near the end of their string as it was; their manpower was increasingly attenuated from the extremely taxing 1918 simultaneous offensives. (Their greatest problems were not material or financial, despite the taxing effect of the blockade and sometimes hilariously mismanaged economic staff. They were, in fact, political – see below.) But they had another, some said final, reserve, which was constituted as the Fourteenth Army under Otto von Below and dispatched into Poland in March. There, the Germans got lucky, and squashed the uprising in its infancy. From Warsaw, Below’s army made its way up the rail lines to the outskirts of Petrograd, where it linked up with a cobbled-together group of loyalist paramilitaries gathered by Stolypin, and prepared to assault the city.
In those months, the example of Chernov’s revolutionaries went out worldwide and spawned a major rash of like uprisings. Jiang, having managed to force the Guomindang loyalist Cai E underground in Yunnan, was faced with a fresh challenge of socialist revolutionaries in the coastal ports. Socialists demonstrated against the war in Tokyo and were shot down by the army in the infamous 4/4 Incident. The United States, fresh from its Mexican intervention (more on that in a subsequent update), was hit by a wave of strikes across the Northeast and the eastern Midwest, sparking a major Red Scare. In France, the Socialists, who conveniently ran the government (even if Millerand was insufficiently Socialist for most of his own party) voted official support to the Petrograd rebels and formally recognized the government, to the horror of many on the French Right. Several soviets formed in northern England and Scotland, as well as one in Dublin; the same happened in the Rhineland and in the German North Sea ports. In one of the more notorious incidents, the Dutch fleet at Surabaya revolted at the behest of the [East] Indies Social Democratic Association (or ISDV), which also formed Red Guards that attempted to take over Java, and nearly sparked a socialist revolution in the metropole.
Thus in a way, all eyes were on Below’s Germans when they prepared to assault Petrograd in the first weeks of April 1919. Chernov’s socialist republic, aided by its own Gambetta, the fiery orator Aleksandr Kerensky, was but one of many threats to the tsarist state, to be sure, but it was by far the deadliest single one. If it were nipped in the bud, Below would send a clear message to the inchoate Forces of World Revolution and, for a time, crush the rebels’ ability to effectively organize. The work of suppressing the revolution would have only just begun, but Petrograd needed to fall if it were to begin at all. As for the socialists, they believed that time was on their side, and if they could make the Germans and the tsarists pay for the ground they took, maybe, just maybe, they could hold off the imperialists long enough to organize a real army.
Below, of course, wasn’t interested in that, and was under orders from Mackensen to finish things as quickly as possible. So instead, on encountering pockets of serious resistance in the streets, the Germans, who had had more than their fill of house to house fighting in this far-too-long war, simply shelled the city with mustard gas. Petrograd had a few factories producing gas masks, and more had been looted from the garrison, so many of the rebels stayed alive, but they were disorganized and isolated, and easily cut down by German stormtroopers and Stolypin’s goons. By April 23, it was all over. Chernov had fled, eventually managing to reach France; Kerensky had been killed by the gas while trying to rally the revolutionaries at the barricades. As anyone could have predicted, things were far from over elsewhere in the country. A long slog awaited the Russo-German forces dealing with Makhno’s anarchists, or with the Basmachis. But the revolution had lost its cohesion, and it would never be regained.
Yet even if Russia had not been knocked out of the war, the revolution did significantly improve the Entente’s ability to strike back. In Afghanistan, the intransigent Habibullah was (finally) formally deposed by the British general Edmund Ironside, despite orders to the contrary, who led his Indian Army troops on a massive invasion of Russian Central Asia. Ironside, who correctly calculated that he wouldn’t be court-martialed if he succeeded, managed to capture Bukhara and Samarkand from their tsarist garrison holdouts while linking up with scattered forces of Basmachis, promising them Turan and all the rest and bringing them a leader: Enver himself, who had fled the wreck of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia with his customary inability to stick with a single project and see it through to the end. A similar offensive ensued in Iran, where the Constitutionalists had finally resolved their power struggle. Rezā Khan had done in Isfahan what Jiang had done in Nanjing, and seized power in a military coup in the autumn of 1918; with the aid of the British General Sir Nevil Macready’s Indian troops, he capitalized on Alekseyev’s confusion by mounting a general offensive on Qum. When that succeeded, he kept pushing, and the Qajar forces of Shuja ud-Daula melted away in front of his army. On March 29, the Constitutionalists reached Iran and proclaimed a new republic as the shah fled into exile in Germany. Various Russian revolutionary forces gained indirect British assistance; the Free Russian Legion of Boris Savinkov, which briefly seized control of most of northern European Russia in May-June 1919, was aided by a British division that had been landed at Arkhangel’sk. And in Manchuria, Tanaka Giichi seized his opportunity with both hands, launching an offensive that forced Brusilov’s weakened army back. In early May, the Japanese reentered Mukden, and by the end of the month, they had captured Port Arthur, once again consigning the Russian Pacific squadron to the bottom of the sea.
The largest offensive was Foch’s, of course. His war-winning offensive was backed up by upwards of a hundred divisions, many of which were taken from other sections of the front and even from Sarrail’s army in northern Italy. It was a last throw of the iron dice in every way. Foch thus chose his target with extra care; he had settled on Luxembourg by the end of the previous year, seeking to break out into the Rhineland and destroy Germany’s industrial heartland, and the Russian Revolution only accelerated his plans. Foch’s armies, both French and British, would be going into the fight employing the newest technology (including roughly a division’s worth of heavily armored support tracks, referred to by the British as ‘tanks’ and by the French as tortues) and the newest tactics, including Philippe Pétain’s recently developed artillery target registry system. By May 5, all was ready.
Mackensen, of course, knew that Foch would try a mass offensive. He did not know where it would be, because of excellent French operational secrecy. He also did not believe his troops had the ability to stop it even if he did know. Germany, too, was on its last reserves. After the fall of Milan in February, Linsingen’s Eleventh Army had been stripped down dramatically, and combined with forces ripped from easily-defended areas of the Moselle front lines and the China front he had cobbled together a fresh army’s worth of reserve troops. He had also convinced Scheer to sally against the British coastline to scare the Lloyd George government into withdrawing even more of its troops from the Low Countries once the fighting had started. This motley collection of measures would have to be enough.
Poison gas worked well on disorganized and untrained revolutionaries, but on German and French infantry it was practically useless. Both sides had been throwing gas at each other for two and a half years, and their soldiers knew what to expect and how to tell if you needed your gas mask or heavy clothing. A few experts, like Pétain and the German Georg Bruchmüller, had recognized that gas was best used not on its own, but in combination with other factors, to constrict enemy movements, distract the soldiers, and otherwise leave them out of position for a short, sharp bombardment with high explosive shells. The enemy infantry would then be set upon by stormtroopers, who would clear out lanes of attack past the most troublesome enemy outposts, leaving those for the regular infantry to clean up. Stormtroop units, however, were problematic in some ways that were not immediately recognized (one of the reasons Falkenhayn eschewed them in his Central Plains campaign). For instance, since they were formed from the best troops in a given unit and sent to make breakthroughs, they suffered disproportionate casualties in initial assaults and could not be used effectively if a campaign took a long time. And the follow-on infantry tended to be deprived of cadres that would make it even more effective, and its quality suffered disproportionately.
Therefore Foch should have recognized that his grand offensive would be necessarily limited in nature, both in terms of space and time. His writings are confused on this point, but he seems to have acknowledged the problem and ignored it on the grounds that it was impossible to do anything about it. He also failed to acknowledge the political dimension, something for which the French army’s critics would mercilessly attack it after the war. Joffre and Foch planned grand offensives into western Germany, but never came up with a “then what” that would make the invasion meaningful. It was as though they expected the Germans to sue for peace upon seeing the Rhineland occupied, whereupon France would get everything it wanted. This was obviously unrealistic. Later commentators, especially in Britain, argued that Foch should have used his considerable influence to convince the Entente to send out peace feelers at the same time as the offensive so the effect would not be wasted.
Foch’s final error was that he seems to have had issues distinguishing tactics from operations. This was not surprising, since it had been a persistent problem for France’s army before the war as well, during a period when Foch himself was one of the main teachers at the superior military academy. The stuff of stormtroop operations was to follow the path of least resistance around the enemy’s strongpoints. Foch seems to have developed this line of thought very well. He then applied it to strategy and eschewed a higher operational plan in favor of assaults on the enemy wherever and whenever he was weakest.
The result, which defined the subsequent Rhenish Campaign, was a series of individually fearsome but unconnected deep thrusts into the German lines, all of which resulted in heavy French casualties. Foch’s troops took their first bite out of the German entrenchments in the initial assault in Luxembourg, where they advanced all the way to the Moselle and then northwards along it, avoiding gathering German resistance on the other side. The local army commander, Max von Gallwitz, had successfully stopped this incursion within a week. Foch’s next blows flowed around the fortress of Liège, but ran into stiff German and Belgian resistance and were unable to complete the encirclement of the fortress. (Accidentally, the French general Charles Mangin nearly forced the evacuation of Liège when he placed German entrenchments near the main railroad into the city through Eupen under artillery fire, interdicting the fortress’ food and ammunition supplies. But after his attack on the German lines nearby was driven back, he broke off the artillery bombardment, thus saving the city and arguably ending France’s ability to win the campaign.) Finally, as June began, Foch launched his largest offensive yet, aimed at Koblenz and Neuwied. It’s unclear what he expected out of this, if he expected anything at all. The French took their deepest bite into the German lines yet, but they promptly bogged down in the suburbs of the city and were halted by June 12 with heavy casualties. The urban setting permitted Mackensen to use his limited reserves to the greatest effect, while erasing the usefulness of the tanks, which had serious problems in the cities and didn’t do great in the Ardennes breakthrough sector either. By late June, Foch’s armies had suffered enough casualties for Mackensen to launch a counterblow, which further chewed up the French and reduced their Western Front forces to a shell, ejecting Foch from German soil.
Foch’s last throw was, by itself, not enough to cause the collapse of the Entente drive for victory. That death knell was sounded by Hoffmann and Leopold, who managed to gain control over the entire Near Eastern part of the allied war effort by pointing out that everybody else was too distracted by Russian revolutionaries or Balkan police actions to do anything about it. With scant opposition by what was left of the Ottoman navy, the Germans landed in northwestern Anatolia. While leaving a flank guard to duel with the Republican Greeks – who had launched a land grab around Smyrna – Hoffmann and Leopold focused the main effort on reaching Ankara, where Talaat and Cemal had been trying to carry on the struggle. Several days before the Germans got there, as they battered through Turkish positions on the Sakarya River, Mustafa Kemal launched a military coup in the name of Turkish (and Kurdish, ironically) nationalism, jettisoning the Arab portions of the empire and forming a new Turkish Republic. Kemal quickly sent out peace feelers to the Germans, which resulted in an armistice and another step towards the end of war.
Goings-on in the colonial theater also impacted on the impetus to end the war – or rather, the lack of goings-on. Despite the redeployment of massive numbers of South Africans and Indians to East Africa, deemed the most troublesome of the German colonies, Jan Smuts was unable to fully eradicate Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schütztruppen despite overrunning the greater portion of the German Tanganyika colony over the course of 1918. Boer advantages in Southwest Africa, like their exceptionally well handled cavalry, proved to be a liability in the East African bush, where the tsetse fly made horse mortality rate a horrifying 100%. Lettow was unable to gain his decisive victory, but got full credit for adaptability, changing his strategy to one of possession and harassing the French and British from the edges of the Belgian Congo up to the end of war. Zimmermann, in Kamerun, was never the focus of the kind of effort that went after Lettow’s army, partly because of the difficulty of attacking the central plateau where his organized his army; he remained in control of the area at war’s end, although Anglo-French attacks had bitten away much of the periphery. Belgian Katanga was also seized by a Boer detachment from Rhodesia, but the main Belgian Congo force was never engaged, and most of the Congo remained in the hands of the Leopoldville government-in-exile. Italy’s colonies, given the utter collapse of the metropole, were a similar mess, and Britain’s forces in Egypt were overstretched trying to occupy both the Levant and Italian Libya. Eritrea was seized by forces loyal to Zewditu, while South African and Indian troops overran Somaliland in the late spring of 1919.
At any rate, by August 1919 it was clear that the war had ground on far too long and that this was about as far as it was going to get for any of the parties involved. Political troubles at home did the rest. Lloyd George was trying to fend off calls for a general election and wanted to try to regain popularity as the man who accepted peace with honor and ended the war. Millerand’s government fell in the aftermath of the Rhenish Campaign and was replaced by one led by Paul Painlevé, who led the antiwar wing of the French Socialists. And in Berlin, Hertling had finally shown himself incapable of governing the Reichstag. His Center-Right allies had lost serious ground in the 1917 elections, but the SPD that returned a clear majority was too riven by internal divisions (chiefly over the question of peace, although the response to Minister of War Wilhelm Groener’s mobilization policies was also mixed) to challenge Hertling’s ability to pass legislation. The revolution, however, had played its part, scaring most of the SPD into speaking with one voice out of fear of Karl Liebknecht’s Spartakists while increasing overall war weariness. The Kaiser replaced Hertling with Maximilian, prince of Baden and noted liberal, who finally brought the SPD into government; among other things, Friedrich Ebert, the SPD party chair, assumed the foreign ministry. At any rate, not even Wilhelm could ignore the need for peace, and pushed for a congress in Potsdam to determine the new world order. Nobody else seriously objected to the choice of location, and so on August 10, 1919, the guns fell silent from Metz to Mukden as a general armistice settled over the world.
It did not take long to reach a general agreement to avoid war reparations. Most of the delegates, like the French foreign minister Aristide Briand and the Austrian Berchtold, were well aware that pretty much everybody had done and received damage in equal parts, except possibly the French. Similarly, all of the colonies were restored to the various states that had controlled them. Lettow and Zimmermann had, indeed, done their jobs well. Only the Italians could not get their colonies back, due to the lack of an Italy to which to return them. With nobody else supplying a better suggestion, the de facto Anglo-French partition of Libya worked out in the winter of 1918-9 – Tripolitania to France, Fezzan and Cyrenaica to British Egypt – was formalized. Zewditu was recognized as negeste negast of Ethiopia in exchange for a British protectorate, along with Italian Somaliland (although the Germans attempted to lay claim to it, the British laughed them off and told them they could trade East Africa for it if they really really wanted to).
The French agreed to withdraw from Belgium and Luxembourg and return the Franco-German border to the status quo ante bellum, and even reluctantly agreed to impose limited demilitarization on both French Lorraine and the German Reichsland; although existing fortresses could be maintained and upgraded, new ones were prohibited. Few objected to the final destruction of Serbia, which was annexed to the Habsburg Empire, or to the formal end of the duke of Aosta’s rule over Albania (replaced by that of Zogu, whose “republic” became a catspaw for German and Austrian influence). Bulgaria ended up annexing a small slice of the Dobruja from Romania while the rest of the delegates unironically shook their heads at the notion of fighting so hard for a bit of sandy, swampy wasteland. More importantly, while Romania’s other territories remained intact, the Austrians forced them to demilitarize Oltenia while reluctantly recognizing Russia’s special rights in the country. The British ended their support for Venizelos’ regime in Heraklion as a quid pro quo for African annexations and under the implicit understanding that the royalist regime was highly navally deficient anyway and posed little to no threat to the British in the Eastern Mediterranean. (Venizelos put up a fight anyway, but was defeated and barely escaped to London ahead of the German fleet sent to assist the king.) Of course, Italy was an intractable problem. Clearly, the socialists that dominated central and southern Italy could not be allowed to persist, but there was no obvious alternative government, and at any rate it would have to be imposed from the outside. The Potsdam delegates therefore agreed to form a multinational pacification force, mostly of Franco-German composition, to restore order to Italy and reconstitute its government, probably in federation form but either way to be decided on at a later date in a later conference.
With Mustafa Kemal’s declaration of a new republic fresh in everybody’s minds, it became quite easy to carve up what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Much of eastern Anatolia fell under Russian control, while Syria, a longtime commercial interest of the French, went, predictably, to France. The British took basically the entirety of the rest of the Ottomans’ old imperial territories, establishing protectorates across the Middle East in the Hijaz, Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq. Palestine itself was initially annexed to Egypt, but when Lloyd George’s government fell in November (spoiler alert haha) that plan was quickly overcome by events. With the Royal Navy having suffered extremely serious losses in the North Sea, security for the Indian Ocean entrances became even more important than it had been, and part and parcel of that was keeping anybody else away from the Red Sea. Bulgaria annexed Thrace up to Çatalca, while the Greeks were given Chios and Mytilene as a consolation prize more than anything else. Controversially, the Russians did not get to keep Tsargrad, but neither did the Bulgarians, and neither the British nor the Russians were prepared to give it to the Germans. Eventually, the city was returned to Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalists, with whom the Russians were now free to negotiate an advantageous Straits Convention on the side that prohibited any country save Russia from using the Straits in time of war, along with granting Russian citizens special rights in Constantinople. (Loud claims that this was practically the return of the capitulations were rapidly stifled by the Kemalists.) Meanwhile, the Constitutionalist-Qajar civil war was finally and formally resolved, with Rezā Khan assuming dictatorial powers in Tehran as an acceptable compromise candidate: the Russians were more willing to work with him than with the Bakhtiaris, and the British were mostly happy that he wasn’t a Russian sockpuppet unlike the Qajar shah.
Russia itself maintained its territorial integrity, despite the Kaiser’s personal desire to set up a Hohenzollern kingdom of Poland to quiet down Polish nationalism in the Reich. However, the tsar had a considerable debt to the Germans, both in sentimental terms for having upheld his reign with bayonets, and in financial terms. Most of the latter was canceled by the formation of an independent Kingdom of Finland under a German noble ruler, Friedrich Karl von Hessen (or Kaarle I, King of Finland and Karelia) – the Finns probably would’ve been too difficult to reconquer anyway, while German influence was necessarily limited, partly by the Finnish parliament and partly by the tyranny of distance. The British ended their ties to the Basmachis and Boris Savinkov and withdrew from Russian Central Asia and Karelia, respectively, while the Russians, in turn, agreed not to support either Habibullah or his brother, Amanullah (the latter of whom was in the midst of leading a rebellion in Kabul) in retaking the Afghan throne.
Of course, the interesting part was to be China, where the Russian occupation of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia was converted into an official annexation, and where Tibetan independence – under British tutelage, of course – was recognized as well. Germany had long held extraordinary rights in Shandong, and – along with Weihaiwei, which Falkenhayn had captured almost nonchalantly in the waning days of the war – was permitted to annex the province. The various Entente powers toyed with the idea of annexing their spheres of influence in Jiang’s Republic, but since these covered approximately two-thirds of the total land area of said Republic and most of the population, the Japanese, British, and French eventually deemed such a step to be unnecessarily destabilizing and at any rate hard to enforce, especially in these straitened circumstances (as it was, the British were virtually incapable of holding what they’d seized in the rest of the world) and kept their extraordinary rights in the relevant regions. Japan was permitted to annex Korea in exchange for withdrawing beyond the Yalu. The remainder of China, which still covered most of China Proper, was divided between Jiang’s dictatorship and Yuan’s dictatorship more or less along the lines of control each side had carved out for itself in the waning months of the war. Jiang and Yuan even jointly agreed to outlaw the Guomindang as a threat to national stability. Hence, although in some respects the Treaties of Potsdam represented retrenchment, their ultimate effect – and the negotiations they spawned later, in the 1920s, following on several then-secret Great Power meetings – was to advance the cause of European imperialism even further. If the 1880s had commenced the New Imperialism, the 1920s would be its apogee.
So it was that, as the Potsdam Conference closed on August 27, the Eurasian War ended, four years, millions of dead and wounded, and billions of pounds (or marks, or francs, or yen) of economic damage after the fateful assassination of Sevket. None of the returning diplomats could say that he had brought peace to his country, for wars still awaited in Russia, Italy, Ireland, and virtually all of the European colonies around the world. New wars and crises would erupt during the coming decade, along with economic tumult and postwar recession, which would only add to mistrust and discontentment between governments, and between people and governments. If anything, the end of the Eurasian War meant that world affairs were about to get considerably more interesting.
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One more left to go before the 1932 end date. As usual, please tell me what I screwed up. The idea is to make this better, although I've failed in that already by massively expanding the length of the TL.
Incidentally, if you think that the quality drops off significantly at the end, you'd probably be right, considering my failing battle to keep my eyes open right now. Sorry about that.
Here's a map. It's kind of semi-accurate. It doesn't attempt to show the unholy Russian mess, or the unholy Irish mess, and doesn't do a very good job of showing the unholy Italian mess. It's mostly a visual aid for the treaties.
In those months, the example of Chernov’s revolutionaries went out worldwide and spawned a major rash of like uprisings. Jiang, having managed to force the Guomindang loyalist Cai E underground in Yunnan, was faced with a fresh challenge of socialist revolutionaries in the coastal ports. Socialists demonstrated against the war in Tokyo and were shot down by the army in the infamous 4/4 Incident. The United States, fresh from its Mexican intervention (more on that in a subsequent update), was hit by a wave of strikes across the Northeast and the eastern Midwest, sparking a major Red Scare. In France, the Socialists, who conveniently ran the government (even if Millerand was insufficiently Socialist for most of his own party) voted official support to the Petrograd rebels and formally recognized the government, to the horror of many on the French Right. Several soviets formed in northern England and Scotland, as well as one in Dublin; the same happened in the Rhineland and in the German North Sea ports. In one of the more notorious incidents, the Dutch fleet at Surabaya revolted at the behest of the [East] Indies Social Democratic Association (or ISDV), which also formed Red Guards that attempted to take over Java, and nearly sparked a socialist revolution in the metropole.
Thus in a way, all eyes were on Below’s Germans when they prepared to assault Petrograd in the first weeks of April 1919. Chernov’s socialist republic, aided by its own Gambetta, the fiery orator Aleksandr Kerensky, was but one of many threats to the tsarist state, to be sure, but it was by far the deadliest single one. If it were nipped in the bud, Below would send a clear message to the inchoate Forces of World Revolution and, for a time, crush the rebels’ ability to effectively organize. The work of suppressing the revolution would have only just begun, but Petrograd needed to fall if it were to begin at all. As for the socialists, they believed that time was on their side, and if they could make the Germans and the tsarists pay for the ground they took, maybe, just maybe, they could hold off the imperialists long enough to organize a real army.
Below, of course, wasn’t interested in that, and was under orders from Mackensen to finish things as quickly as possible. So instead, on encountering pockets of serious resistance in the streets, the Germans, who had had more than their fill of house to house fighting in this far-too-long war, simply shelled the city with mustard gas. Petrograd had a few factories producing gas masks, and more had been looted from the garrison, so many of the rebels stayed alive, but they were disorganized and isolated, and easily cut down by German stormtroopers and Stolypin’s goons. By April 23, it was all over. Chernov had fled, eventually managing to reach France; Kerensky had been killed by the gas while trying to rally the revolutionaries at the barricades. As anyone could have predicted, things were far from over elsewhere in the country. A long slog awaited the Russo-German forces dealing with Makhno’s anarchists, or with the Basmachis. But the revolution had lost its cohesion, and it would never be regained.
Yet even if Russia had not been knocked out of the war, the revolution did significantly improve the Entente’s ability to strike back. In Afghanistan, the intransigent Habibullah was (finally) formally deposed by the British general Edmund Ironside, despite orders to the contrary, who led his Indian Army troops on a massive invasion of Russian Central Asia. Ironside, who correctly calculated that he wouldn’t be court-martialed if he succeeded, managed to capture Bukhara and Samarkand from their tsarist garrison holdouts while linking up with scattered forces of Basmachis, promising them Turan and all the rest and bringing them a leader: Enver himself, who had fled the wreck of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia with his customary inability to stick with a single project and see it through to the end. A similar offensive ensued in Iran, where the Constitutionalists had finally resolved their power struggle. Rezā Khan had done in Isfahan what Jiang had done in Nanjing, and seized power in a military coup in the autumn of 1918; with the aid of the British General Sir Nevil Macready’s Indian troops, he capitalized on Alekseyev’s confusion by mounting a general offensive on Qum. When that succeeded, he kept pushing, and the Qajar forces of Shuja ud-Daula melted away in front of his army. On March 29, the Constitutionalists reached Iran and proclaimed a new republic as the shah fled into exile in Germany. Various Russian revolutionary forces gained indirect British assistance; the Free Russian Legion of Boris Savinkov, which briefly seized control of most of northern European Russia in May-June 1919, was aided by a British division that had been landed at Arkhangel’sk. And in Manchuria, Tanaka Giichi seized his opportunity with both hands, launching an offensive that forced Brusilov’s weakened army back. In early May, the Japanese reentered Mukden, and by the end of the month, they had captured Port Arthur, once again consigning the Russian Pacific squadron to the bottom of the sea.
The largest offensive was Foch’s, of course. His war-winning offensive was backed up by upwards of a hundred divisions, many of which were taken from other sections of the front and even from Sarrail’s army in northern Italy. It was a last throw of the iron dice in every way. Foch thus chose his target with extra care; he had settled on Luxembourg by the end of the previous year, seeking to break out into the Rhineland and destroy Germany’s industrial heartland, and the Russian Revolution only accelerated his plans. Foch’s armies, both French and British, would be going into the fight employing the newest technology (including roughly a division’s worth of heavily armored support tracks, referred to by the British as ‘tanks’ and by the French as tortues) and the newest tactics, including Philippe Pétain’s recently developed artillery target registry system. By May 5, all was ready.
Mackensen, of course, knew that Foch would try a mass offensive. He did not know where it would be, because of excellent French operational secrecy. He also did not believe his troops had the ability to stop it even if he did know. Germany, too, was on its last reserves. After the fall of Milan in February, Linsingen’s Eleventh Army had been stripped down dramatically, and combined with forces ripped from easily-defended areas of the Moselle front lines and the China front he had cobbled together a fresh army’s worth of reserve troops. He had also convinced Scheer to sally against the British coastline to scare the Lloyd George government into withdrawing even more of its troops from the Low Countries once the fighting had started. This motley collection of measures would have to be enough.
Poison gas worked well on disorganized and untrained revolutionaries, but on German and French infantry it was practically useless. Both sides had been throwing gas at each other for two and a half years, and their soldiers knew what to expect and how to tell if you needed your gas mask or heavy clothing. A few experts, like Pétain and the German Georg Bruchmüller, had recognized that gas was best used not on its own, but in combination with other factors, to constrict enemy movements, distract the soldiers, and otherwise leave them out of position for a short, sharp bombardment with high explosive shells. The enemy infantry would then be set upon by stormtroopers, who would clear out lanes of attack past the most troublesome enemy outposts, leaving those for the regular infantry to clean up. Stormtroop units, however, were problematic in some ways that were not immediately recognized (one of the reasons Falkenhayn eschewed them in his Central Plains campaign). For instance, since they were formed from the best troops in a given unit and sent to make breakthroughs, they suffered disproportionate casualties in initial assaults and could not be used effectively if a campaign took a long time. And the follow-on infantry tended to be deprived of cadres that would make it even more effective, and its quality suffered disproportionately.
Therefore Foch should have recognized that his grand offensive would be necessarily limited in nature, both in terms of space and time. His writings are confused on this point, but he seems to have acknowledged the problem and ignored it on the grounds that it was impossible to do anything about it. He also failed to acknowledge the political dimension, something for which the French army’s critics would mercilessly attack it after the war. Joffre and Foch planned grand offensives into western Germany, but never came up with a “then what” that would make the invasion meaningful. It was as though they expected the Germans to sue for peace upon seeing the Rhineland occupied, whereupon France would get everything it wanted. This was obviously unrealistic. Later commentators, especially in Britain, argued that Foch should have used his considerable influence to convince the Entente to send out peace feelers at the same time as the offensive so the effect would not be wasted.
Foch’s final error was that he seems to have had issues distinguishing tactics from operations. This was not surprising, since it had been a persistent problem for France’s army before the war as well, during a period when Foch himself was one of the main teachers at the superior military academy. The stuff of stormtroop operations was to follow the path of least resistance around the enemy’s strongpoints. Foch seems to have developed this line of thought very well. He then applied it to strategy and eschewed a higher operational plan in favor of assaults on the enemy wherever and whenever he was weakest.
The result, which defined the subsequent Rhenish Campaign, was a series of individually fearsome but unconnected deep thrusts into the German lines, all of which resulted in heavy French casualties. Foch’s troops took their first bite out of the German entrenchments in the initial assault in Luxembourg, where they advanced all the way to the Moselle and then northwards along it, avoiding gathering German resistance on the other side. The local army commander, Max von Gallwitz, had successfully stopped this incursion within a week. Foch’s next blows flowed around the fortress of Liège, but ran into stiff German and Belgian resistance and were unable to complete the encirclement of the fortress. (Accidentally, the French general Charles Mangin nearly forced the evacuation of Liège when he placed German entrenchments near the main railroad into the city through Eupen under artillery fire, interdicting the fortress’ food and ammunition supplies. But after his attack on the German lines nearby was driven back, he broke off the artillery bombardment, thus saving the city and arguably ending France’s ability to win the campaign.) Finally, as June began, Foch launched his largest offensive yet, aimed at Koblenz and Neuwied. It’s unclear what he expected out of this, if he expected anything at all. The French took their deepest bite into the German lines yet, but they promptly bogged down in the suburbs of the city and were halted by June 12 with heavy casualties. The urban setting permitted Mackensen to use his limited reserves to the greatest effect, while erasing the usefulness of the tanks, which had serious problems in the cities and didn’t do great in the Ardennes breakthrough sector either. By late June, Foch’s armies had suffered enough casualties for Mackensen to launch a counterblow, which further chewed up the French and reduced their Western Front forces to a shell, ejecting Foch from German soil.
Foch’s last throw was, by itself, not enough to cause the collapse of the Entente drive for victory. That death knell was sounded by Hoffmann and Leopold, who managed to gain control over the entire Near Eastern part of the allied war effort by pointing out that everybody else was too distracted by Russian revolutionaries or Balkan police actions to do anything about it. With scant opposition by what was left of the Ottoman navy, the Germans landed in northwestern Anatolia. While leaving a flank guard to duel with the Republican Greeks – who had launched a land grab around Smyrna – Hoffmann and Leopold focused the main effort on reaching Ankara, where Talaat and Cemal had been trying to carry on the struggle. Several days before the Germans got there, as they battered through Turkish positions on the Sakarya River, Mustafa Kemal launched a military coup in the name of Turkish (and Kurdish, ironically) nationalism, jettisoning the Arab portions of the empire and forming a new Turkish Republic. Kemal quickly sent out peace feelers to the Germans, which resulted in an armistice and another step towards the end of war.
Goings-on in the colonial theater also impacted on the impetus to end the war – or rather, the lack of goings-on. Despite the redeployment of massive numbers of South Africans and Indians to East Africa, deemed the most troublesome of the German colonies, Jan Smuts was unable to fully eradicate Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schütztruppen despite overrunning the greater portion of the German Tanganyika colony over the course of 1918. Boer advantages in Southwest Africa, like their exceptionally well handled cavalry, proved to be a liability in the East African bush, where the tsetse fly made horse mortality rate a horrifying 100%. Lettow was unable to gain his decisive victory, but got full credit for adaptability, changing his strategy to one of possession and harassing the French and British from the edges of the Belgian Congo up to the end of war. Zimmermann, in Kamerun, was never the focus of the kind of effort that went after Lettow’s army, partly because of the difficulty of attacking the central plateau where his organized his army; he remained in control of the area at war’s end, although Anglo-French attacks had bitten away much of the periphery. Belgian Katanga was also seized by a Boer detachment from Rhodesia, but the main Belgian Congo force was never engaged, and most of the Congo remained in the hands of the Leopoldville government-in-exile. Italy’s colonies, given the utter collapse of the metropole, were a similar mess, and Britain’s forces in Egypt were overstretched trying to occupy both the Levant and Italian Libya. Eritrea was seized by forces loyal to Zewditu, while South African and Indian troops overran Somaliland in the late spring of 1919.
At any rate, by August 1919 it was clear that the war had ground on far too long and that this was about as far as it was going to get for any of the parties involved. Political troubles at home did the rest. Lloyd George was trying to fend off calls for a general election and wanted to try to regain popularity as the man who accepted peace with honor and ended the war. Millerand’s government fell in the aftermath of the Rhenish Campaign and was replaced by one led by Paul Painlevé, who led the antiwar wing of the French Socialists. And in Berlin, Hertling had finally shown himself incapable of governing the Reichstag. His Center-Right allies had lost serious ground in the 1917 elections, but the SPD that returned a clear majority was too riven by internal divisions (chiefly over the question of peace, although the response to Minister of War Wilhelm Groener’s mobilization policies was also mixed) to challenge Hertling’s ability to pass legislation. The revolution, however, had played its part, scaring most of the SPD into speaking with one voice out of fear of Karl Liebknecht’s Spartakists while increasing overall war weariness. The Kaiser replaced Hertling with Maximilian, prince of Baden and noted liberal, who finally brought the SPD into government; among other things, Friedrich Ebert, the SPD party chair, assumed the foreign ministry. At any rate, not even Wilhelm could ignore the need for peace, and pushed for a congress in Potsdam to determine the new world order. Nobody else seriously objected to the choice of location, and so on August 10, 1919, the guns fell silent from Metz to Mukden as a general armistice settled over the world.
It did not take long to reach a general agreement to avoid war reparations. Most of the delegates, like the French foreign minister Aristide Briand and the Austrian Berchtold, were well aware that pretty much everybody had done and received damage in equal parts, except possibly the French. Similarly, all of the colonies were restored to the various states that had controlled them. Lettow and Zimmermann had, indeed, done their jobs well. Only the Italians could not get their colonies back, due to the lack of an Italy to which to return them. With nobody else supplying a better suggestion, the de facto Anglo-French partition of Libya worked out in the winter of 1918-9 – Tripolitania to France, Fezzan and Cyrenaica to British Egypt – was formalized. Zewditu was recognized as negeste negast of Ethiopia in exchange for a British protectorate, along with Italian Somaliland (although the Germans attempted to lay claim to it, the British laughed them off and told them they could trade East Africa for it if they really really wanted to).
The French agreed to withdraw from Belgium and Luxembourg and return the Franco-German border to the status quo ante bellum, and even reluctantly agreed to impose limited demilitarization on both French Lorraine and the German Reichsland; although existing fortresses could be maintained and upgraded, new ones were prohibited. Few objected to the final destruction of Serbia, which was annexed to the Habsburg Empire, or to the formal end of the duke of Aosta’s rule over Albania (replaced by that of Zogu, whose “republic” became a catspaw for German and Austrian influence). Bulgaria ended up annexing a small slice of the Dobruja from Romania while the rest of the delegates unironically shook their heads at the notion of fighting so hard for a bit of sandy, swampy wasteland. More importantly, while Romania’s other territories remained intact, the Austrians forced them to demilitarize Oltenia while reluctantly recognizing Russia’s special rights in the country. The British ended their support for Venizelos’ regime in Heraklion as a quid pro quo for African annexations and under the implicit understanding that the royalist regime was highly navally deficient anyway and posed little to no threat to the British in the Eastern Mediterranean. (Venizelos put up a fight anyway, but was defeated and barely escaped to London ahead of the German fleet sent to assist the king.) Of course, Italy was an intractable problem. Clearly, the socialists that dominated central and southern Italy could not be allowed to persist, but there was no obvious alternative government, and at any rate it would have to be imposed from the outside. The Potsdam delegates therefore agreed to form a multinational pacification force, mostly of Franco-German composition, to restore order to Italy and reconstitute its government, probably in federation form but either way to be decided on at a later date in a later conference.
With Mustafa Kemal’s declaration of a new republic fresh in everybody’s minds, it became quite easy to carve up what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Much of eastern Anatolia fell under Russian control, while Syria, a longtime commercial interest of the French, went, predictably, to France. The British took basically the entirety of the rest of the Ottomans’ old imperial territories, establishing protectorates across the Middle East in the Hijaz, Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq. Palestine itself was initially annexed to Egypt, but when Lloyd George’s government fell in November (spoiler alert haha) that plan was quickly overcome by events. With the Royal Navy having suffered extremely serious losses in the North Sea, security for the Indian Ocean entrances became even more important than it had been, and part and parcel of that was keeping anybody else away from the Red Sea. Bulgaria annexed Thrace up to Çatalca, while the Greeks were given Chios and Mytilene as a consolation prize more than anything else. Controversially, the Russians did not get to keep Tsargrad, but neither did the Bulgarians, and neither the British nor the Russians were prepared to give it to the Germans. Eventually, the city was returned to Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalists, with whom the Russians were now free to negotiate an advantageous Straits Convention on the side that prohibited any country save Russia from using the Straits in time of war, along with granting Russian citizens special rights in Constantinople. (Loud claims that this was practically the return of the capitulations were rapidly stifled by the Kemalists.) Meanwhile, the Constitutionalist-Qajar civil war was finally and formally resolved, with Rezā Khan assuming dictatorial powers in Tehran as an acceptable compromise candidate: the Russians were more willing to work with him than with the Bakhtiaris, and the British were mostly happy that he wasn’t a Russian sockpuppet unlike the Qajar shah.
Russia itself maintained its territorial integrity, despite the Kaiser’s personal desire to set up a Hohenzollern kingdom of Poland to quiet down Polish nationalism in the Reich. However, the tsar had a considerable debt to the Germans, both in sentimental terms for having upheld his reign with bayonets, and in financial terms. Most of the latter was canceled by the formation of an independent Kingdom of Finland under a German noble ruler, Friedrich Karl von Hessen (or Kaarle I, King of Finland and Karelia) – the Finns probably would’ve been too difficult to reconquer anyway, while German influence was necessarily limited, partly by the Finnish parliament and partly by the tyranny of distance. The British ended their ties to the Basmachis and Boris Savinkov and withdrew from Russian Central Asia and Karelia, respectively, while the Russians, in turn, agreed not to support either Habibullah or his brother, Amanullah (the latter of whom was in the midst of leading a rebellion in Kabul) in retaking the Afghan throne.
Of course, the interesting part was to be China, where the Russian occupation of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia was converted into an official annexation, and where Tibetan independence – under British tutelage, of course – was recognized as well. Germany had long held extraordinary rights in Shandong, and – along with Weihaiwei, which Falkenhayn had captured almost nonchalantly in the waning days of the war – was permitted to annex the province. The various Entente powers toyed with the idea of annexing their spheres of influence in Jiang’s Republic, but since these covered approximately two-thirds of the total land area of said Republic and most of the population, the Japanese, British, and French eventually deemed such a step to be unnecessarily destabilizing and at any rate hard to enforce, especially in these straitened circumstances (as it was, the British were virtually incapable of holding what they’d seized in the rest of the world) and kept their extraordinary rights in the relevant regions. Japan was permitted to annex Korea in exchange for withdrawing beyond the Yalu. The remainder of China, which still covered most of China Proper, was divided between Jiang’s dictatorship and Yuan’s dictatorship more or less along the lines of control each side had carved out for itself in the waning months of the war. Jiang and Yuan even jointly agreed to outlaw the Guomindang as a threat to national stability. Hence, although in some respects the Treaties of Potsdam represented retrenchment, their ultimate effect – and the negotiations they spawned later, in the 1920s, following on several then-secret Great Power meetings – was to advance the cause of European imperialism even further. If the 1880s had commenced the New Imperialism, the 1920s would be its apogee.
So it was that, as the Potsdam Conference closed on August 27, the Eurasian War ended, four years, millions of dead and wounded, and billions of pounds (or marks, or francs, or yen) of economic damage after the fateful assassination of Sevket. None of the returning diplomats could say that he had brought peace to his country, for wars still awaited in Russia, Italy, Ireland, and virtually all of the European colonies around the world. New wars and crises would erupt during the coming decade, along with economic tumult and postwar recession, which would only add to mistrust and discontentment between governments, and between people and governments. If anything, the end of the Eurasian War meant that world affairs were about to get considerably more interesting.
---
One more left to go before the 1932 end date. As usual, please tell me what I screwed up. The idea is to make this better, although I've failed in that already by massively expanding the length of the TL.
Incidentally, if you think that the quality drops off significantly at the end, you'd probably be right, considering my failing battle to keep my eyes open right now. Sorry about that.
Here's a map. It's kind of semi-accurate. It doesn't attempt to show the unholy Russian mess, or the unholy Irish mess, and doesn't do a very good job of showing the unholy Italian mess. It's mostly a visual aid for the treaties.
Spoiler World Map 0000Z 01SEP1919 :
You mention the Russians attaining numerical superiority over the Ottomans in the Black Sea only as late as 1917 (IIRC). Was that because the Russian Navy widely dispersed, or are the Ottomans less hopeless than I believed them to be? Funny to see Enver reliving much the same path. Entertaining to be sure. Compared to OTL WWI, how do you think casualties compare, even if we don't include the Chinese theater? They seem horrific.
Lastly, aside from a relative being given a throne in Finland and Shandong, the Germans don't seem to have gained much relative to their effort. Obviously it isn't "fair" or whatever you want to call it, but I'm surprised the Germans didn't demand more. Also, what's up with Sicily?
Lastly, aside from a relative being given a throne in Finland and Shandong, the Germans don't seem to have gained much relative to their effort. Obviously it isn't "fair" or whatever you want to call it, but I'm surprised the Germans didn't demand more. Also, what's up with Sicily?
das
Regeneration In Process
Belatedly catching up.
Enemies, surely?
How quickly was the BEF deployed to Central Asia? Presumably they sent it there some time in advance while the crisis was developing. Still, you'd think there would be something of an issue among the British command as to whether or not it would be better if they sent the troops to help the French right away instead.
Ouch. Whatever happened to the Party Truce?
As much as I like Lloyd George, you'd think his position would be rather weaker than in OTL. No Ministry of Munitions, no nothing, plus there was the outcry connected to the alcohol duties.
The Tsarists themselves would have disagreed.
EDIT: I had some other comments, but they seem to have been mysteriously swallowed up. Ah well, they weren't very significant. Kudos on Stolypin surviving.
Enemies, surely?
How quickly was the BEF deployed to Central Asia? Presumably they sent it there some time in advance while the crisis was developing. Still, you'd think there would be something of an issue among the British command as to whether or not it would be better if they sent the troops to help the French right away instead.
Ouch. Whatever happened to the Party Truce?
As much as I like Lloyd George, you'd think his position would be rather weaker than in OTL. No Ministry of Munitions, no nothing, plus there was the outcry connected to the alcohol duties.
Kraznaya said:
The Tsarists themselves would have disagreed.
EDIT: I had some other comments, but they seem to have been mysteriously swallowed up. Ah well, they weren't very significant. Kudos on Stolypin surviving.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
No Gallipoli, and far fewer catastrophic battles on the Western Front; also the British themselves seem to have taken far fewer casualties than the ANZAC and Japanese forces in China. So casualty rates are much more evenly spread globally than disproportionately Western European. My impression is that Britain, France, and Germany all came out of this much better than OTL as regards manpower. Unsure about Russia. Obviously the Chinese died in droves but <insert insensitive comment about Chinese population growth here>.
However, there's much more of a need for fleet reconstruction for almost everyone. No Washington Treaty for this world, to be sure. Whether Britain will be able to sustain the massive amount of reconstruction and reform necessary to remain competitive with the High Seas Fleet seems to be up in the air.
Also, no tanks? D: [Never mind, I see the French got some in 1918.] I was worrying the zeppelins would escape mention as well, until the end of things. A bit disappointed that Allenby didn't get any mentions, too...I was thinking he'd be particularly useful in the Balkan Theatre.
Mentioned it earlier, but the Ottoman fleet was actually numerically superior to the Russians at the outbreak of war. The British never confiscated the Dreadnoughts the Ottomans had on order for obvious reasons (although, to balance it out, the Ottomans ordered fewer ships because of a lack of a Chios-Mytilene crisis with the Greeks, as there was in OTL 1914). The Russians, meanwhile, split their fleet building between the Black and Baltic Seas as historically, with perhaps a bit more confusion. Russia was building several Dreadnoughts, though, and these - the Imperatritsa Mariya class - were completed in late 1916-7.
Enver's involvement with the Basmachis is one of the best parts of the whole confusing post-WWI period. I just had to include it somehow.Yui108 said:
Let's see...Yui108 said:
Civilian casualties in Germany are lower. The Germans were able to mitigate the effects of the blockade to a limited extent with Russian food purchases, and furthermore didn't deplete their agricultural sector nearly as early as they did historically with mobilization. In addition, over a million German troops ended up subsisting off of Chinese food production. Same thing with France: France itself was barely touched by direct military action, a fact that didn't get nearly as much play in these pages as it probably ought to have. On the other hand, civilian casualties in the Balkans, not to mention Italy, are horrific, even if you leave out the Hungarian Genocide and whatever the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians were doing to each other. Russia is having roughly as much of a nightmare as it had historically.
Military casualties are way lower (if you don't include China, which saw the longest-term fighting, some of the most ideologically vicious fighting, more frequent atrocities, and, of course, the single bloodiest campaign of the entire war). The bloodiest campaign of the entire war - Falkenhayn's Central Plains Campaign1 - was in a league of its own. Part of the reason behind this is that Falkenhayn's attritional strategy was not implemented often during the war, and when it was, it was implemented "correctly". So there was never any mutual mass bloodletting like Verdun. With Mackensen in charge on the German side and Joffre in charge on the French side (both of them being advocates of annihilation, Bewegungskrieg, and such), nobody (except Falkenhayn, and he implemented his ideas late in the war) decided "hey, it seems like a good idea to target the enemy's manpower" instead of positional warfare as, um, warfare to seize positions.
They've got plenty of opportunity to get more in the immediate postwar era. Finland was perhaps only the beginning of Germany's demands on the tsar for saving his throne.Yui108 said:
Limited British forces have occupied a few major ports as of April 1919 and periodically send patrols into the interior. I was lazy and didn't quite know how to show "areas of little to no organization but plenty of disorder" (white seems so tacky) so I just flood-filled.Yui108 said:
Decision was made in the second to last week of March 1915, fueling postwar claims by German historians that the British, in fact, planned the whole thing as a preemptive strike to secure their world power from Russia's challenge.
But seriously: yeah, continentalism certainly was an issue, but not as much of one as it was historically. While Henry Wilson and others had made plans to deploy the British army into Belgium (with a large amount of confusion as to whether it would go there via the Channel ports or Antwerp), they were somewhat stifled by the mechanism of the outbreak of the war. Grey and Churchill hoped that the Germans would not, in fact, intervene on Russia's side, seeing Germany as possessing little to no interest in a Caucasus and Central Asian war. With French arguing the same point (which, hilariously, he attempted to do historically in 1914 despite the fact that Russia was Britain's ally) it was a relatively easy decision to send the BEF to Karachi.Of course, continentalism ended up triumphing with the dispatch of Second Army to Antwerp in 1916, and there, Wilson's ideas ended up playing more of a role than did French's. The British did not have an area of the front carved out as 'theirs', and were instead employed as the general strategic reserve. In many offensives, British divisions were intermingled with French ones, something that would have caused French to have a heart attack if he weren't in Central Asia.
It didn't quite mean as much as it did historically without Asquith stabbing the Nationalists in the back over Tyrone and Fermanagh. It was a lot easier to bond when the floor was still wet with Redmond's blood. And issues like the Boer War would cut pretty close to vital Tory interests anyway.das said:
Absolutely. Part of the reason he's survived so well is that the Liberals command enough seats in the Commons to make them indispensable, but Lloyd George himself is one of the few Liberals left with any shred of popularity and ability to command support from the backbenchers. When the next general election comes, as it will have to do quite soon without the excuse of the war to suspend it, the Liberals are going to get fisted. (I think I'll be having entirely too much fun writing the 1919 general election.) It's hard to imagine them disappearing any faster than they did in OTL, but at least in the short term, I don't see a way around it.das said:
Actually, that's one of yours.das said:
And thanks for the comments. Proofreading is far from my strongest suit.
Gallipoli itself was actually slightly less-bad, in terms of casualties, than was the Zhili Campaign. But much of this is about right: the British in particular will come out of this well. Haig was never in a position of supreme authority, for one thing. (One of my favorite jokes: Haig was the greatest Scottish general of all time. No one else managed to kill so many Sassenach. /morbid cackle) British forces, outside of the to-be-unfairly-reviled Maastricht offensive, were not really exposed to prolonged grind-it-out combat the way they were in OTL.
Absolutely, although I'd temper that enthusiasm for the High Seas Fleet a bit - the SPD is not particularly interested in throwing money at the navy, and plenty of naval theorists are going to comment on the usefulness and viability of Germany's alternative weapons (though they will certainly not become as important as they were in OTL, with the Nazis' shift to a navy built around commerce raiding, they will siphon plenty of funds from any effort to return to the Tirpitzian fleet construction tempo).Thlayli said:
Tanks did indeed play a role, and received disproportionate attention in Foch's final offensive (with plenty of theorists arguing that they were utterly useless in the poor terrain). They were also employed, with slightly more success, by the British forces attached to the Constitutionalists during Reza Khan's final offensive. I figured that there wasn't enough of a reason to put lots of money into development for awhile longer. Churchill notably didn't have the pull to do it after the Borkum disaster. And the British army was not in the same position on the Continent as it was in OTL.Thlayli said:
Allenby himself was in charge of Ironside's cavalry corps at the end of the war, having stayed in Central Asia for the duration. He remained a talented officer, but since he stayed in a backwater region for the whole war and had the sort of conflicts with his superiors that his personality made nearly inevitable, he never got the opportunities that he had in OTL with that blind-luck transfer to the Levant. Some people didn't get promoted like they did historically.
For instance, Ludendorff never got his opportunities for a meteoric rise to prominence and ended the war as chief of staff to Third Army on the Western Front. He continued to be known as a reasonably proficient staff officer who was a bit too neurotic and nervy for higher command. I personally think that Ludendorff never would have become the famous officer that he was without the partnership with Hindenburg, whose calming influence and ability to seem like a war leader (a consistently underrated trait) mitigated Ludendorff's own personality quirks. Hindenburg remained in retirement.2 Kolchak's greatest prominence was as the commander of the Black Sea Fleet's battle squadron. Pétain never made it past brigadier and ended up being the French version of Colonel Bruchmüller by the end of the war. Nivelle ended the war as a corps commander in Foch's offensive; while regarded as a fine officer, he didn't have the sort of luck that placed him in Verdun in OTL. Byng and Gough were advisors to the Ottoman Empire and ended up gaining Turkish field commands by the end of the war; both ended up gaining the undying hatred of Turkish nationalists by surrendering their commands to Indian Army units dispatched to seize Iraq in the spring of 1919.
Some guys I thought deserved more attention got it. For instance, poor Grierson, who was apparently the best British general officer before WWI, died unexpectedly of natural causes while on his way to take over II Corps in the BEF in August 1914 and was replaced by Smith-Dorrien. I ended up giving him a much bigger role in TTL, although he ended up having a more tragic end. Ingenohl is another good example. The guy couldn't buy luck as the commander of the High Seas Fleet, despite having better ideas about how to use it than anybody except maybe Scheer. So I gave him slightly better timing for the Yarmouth raid equivalent and made him the commander in one of Germany's greatest victories in the war.
And then again, I had some officers pretty much remain the same. Hunter-Weston remained a butcher, and even served at the alt-Gallipoli. Falkenhayn and his inseparable ops officer Adolf Wild von Hohenborn remained advocates of attrition in its most refined form - das' idea of placing Falkenhayn in China was, incidentally, one of my favorite things about the original TL, one that I tried to emulate by bringing Kornilov there (wish I could've had Beatty as commander of the China Station to complete the trifecta). Most of the German army's initial field commanders in the West remained the same on the grounds that most of those appointments came out of peacetime commands. Sturdee remained a solid commander - but in OTL he had insanely good luck at the Falklands despite making a few poor decisions, and I sort of balanced it out. Same with Beatty, who remained extremely aggressive and ended up paying the piper compared to a very lucky historical career. Henry Wilson was basically the exact same person, down to his assassination in London over the Irish Question. Sarrail got the same notoriety for his Balkan campaigning as he did historically. Although I didn't actually name them (believe it or not, I purposefully omitted detail in this epic), Otto Liman von Sanders, chief liaison officer between Falkenhayn and Duan Qirui, and Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, commander of a Beiyang army corps in Sichuan, had remarkably similar histories as well. Similarly, Gerhard Tappen stayed ops officer for OHL, and Wilhelm Groener remained in charge of railways, and eventually became war minister on the strength of his legendary talent for organization. And you can bet your ass that Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, even though he should only be a cavalry division commander, will end up being a bloody baron in Mongolia and Central Asia in TTL, albeit under rather different circumstances. (I'll figure out a way to make it work. Ungern-Sternberg is too valuable a personality to waste as a footnote.)
1 = I actually made the Central Plains Campaign almost an exact, direct analog of a historical WWI campaign, almost down to the casualty rate and its grand architect. If you guess it - shouldn't be too hard - I'll totally give that major weight when I consider apps for the NES this is probably going to turn into. Here's a factoid that might make it more obvious: the Russian press referred to the German Ninth Army at Zhengzhou as the "phalanx Falkenhayn". My apologies to Robert Foley.
2 = It was a bit blatant, but I was kind of trying to make Hoffmann and Leopold be the Hindenburg and Ludendorff (see: same initials, H & L) of this war, albeit without the whole silent dictatorship angle and with a considerably greater deal of common sense. This has some precedent. Hoffmann and Leopold actually did serve together on the Eastern Front for a year, and seemed to have good chemistry according to Hoffmann's own memoirs. I had been thinking of pairing Hoffmann with Alexander von Linsingen or Rupprecht but ended up going with Leopold after I read The War of Lost Opportunities. On the advice of my editors - ha! - I elected not to include even more obvious stuff like openly referring to their Middle Eastern command in 1919 as "OberOst".
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Interesting asides all; I don't know nearly enough about early 20th century military personalities. Though since I'll be taking a course on Imperial Germany this semester, hopefully my ignorance will begin to dissipate.
As *ironic* as it would be for the British to concede capital ship construction to Germany and focus on the asymmetric submarine efforts that did somewhat promisingly in the Baltic, I can't help but think that "we-rule-the-seas" mentality will force the British into spending more than they can afford. Jellicoe's still the admiralissimo, right? It'll be interesting to see how the Royal Navy gets reconstructed.
But the British could arguably fight a much better naval war (and maintain an equally effective blockade) with U-boats and cruisers than with economy-busting battleships. (And aircraft carriers...?)
Edit: Speaking of luck, I think you killed off more British upper-level officers than any other nation. By far. The British troops may have acquitted well, but the general officers died in droves in this TL.
As *ironic* as it would be for the British to concede capital ship construction to Germany and focus on the asymmetric submarine efforts that did somewhat promisingly in the Baltic, I can't help but think that "we-rule-the-seas" mentality will force the British into spending more than they can afford. Jellicoe's still the admiralissimo, right? It'll be interesting to see how the Royal Navy gets reconstructed.
But the British could arguably fight a much better naval war (and maintain an equally effective blockade) with U-boats and cruisers than with economy-busting battleships. (And aircraft carriers...?)
Edit: Speaking of luck, I think you killed off more British upper-level officers than any other nation. By far. The British troops may have acquitted well, but the general officers died in droves in this TL.
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