Well, hopefully the base map that I posted is satisfactory.
Oh, more than so; the GIMP on my computer is simply giving problems. And of course, Paint isn't on these Unix boxes. The main changes have been made; it's really only a matter of coloring at this point.
das said:
Christianity probably won't really be able to replace Islam there, though I maintain that it will establish some presence there.
Replace what religion? I don't see any Islam...just some heretical Christians, that's all.
das said:
That is my favourite kind of althist.
Aye.
I would think that it's a bit early for
that particular Rider of Abaddon, but eh...
By the way, that's a smashing althist Strategos. Good show. Mine's a bit ridden with grammatical errors and poor writing, but you get the general idea, eh?
In August 1914, Europe, master of the entire planet, suddenly burst into flames, begun by the undying embers of Balkan crises and fanned by the wind of jingoist nationalism. With the European descent into chaos came an outbreak of all that any nation had ever had against another: ancient conflicts, never quite resolved to the satisfaction of one party or the other, were oil poured on the already vast fire. The alliance system of Europe solidified in the past seven years with the Anglo-Russian agreement on Persia and the two Balkan Wars, which in turn shattered Turkish power in the Balkans and subsequently damaged Bulgaria. These alliances, the Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian agreements (including the famous entente cordiale) shackled those who would douse the conflagration and urge a return to peace and sanity, as did the masses, who saw the return to war as a release from the infuriating bondage of peace, whereas the war would return things to their rightful state and strengthen their cause at the expense of their opponents, who would only weaken and perhaps perish. Only the strongest would survive, and so all attempts halfhearted as they were to stop the beginning conflict were rejected as not merely contempt for the weak, but a survival tactic, a paring of the superseded elements from the nation.
It is well known how the most influential and critical events in the history of the modern world began: the attack on the Belgian Meuse forts, the battles in Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, where the Germans repulsed the French assault, the inexorable German right wing swinging down upon the French flank, with the French commander in chief Joseph Joffre brilliantly reorganizing his shattered armies, coercing the British Expeditionary Force to rejoin the fray, and directing a left hook of his own that blunted the German drive and saved the Third Republic at the Marne - how in the east, the Germans, outnumbered and on the verge of retreat, transported their armies by rail to reposition and encircle the Russian Second Army in the most decisive battle of the war, Tannenberg, where Germany was saved from the Allies at the same time as Joffre was saving the Allies from Germany - how the Austrian drive on Serbia was blunted by the heroic holding action of General Putniks men, and how the Russian hordes swept through Galicia to the edge of the Hungarian Plains, bottling up hundreds of thousands of the Kaiser und Königs men inside Przemysl and Lemberg how the great navies of the age, the German and British, avoided a major clash but still skirmished in the Heligoland Bight, how the German ships Goeben and Breslau slipped the British net in the Mediterranean and made it to the Ottoman Empire to lead that nations naval attack on Russia to open that phase of the war, and how German Unterseeboots began to cruise the waves, sinking several British capital ships and merchantmen. All these events combined, by the beginning of 1915, into what was essentially stalemate. The Allies, at the beginning of the year, launched major attacks in Artois and Champagne to regain the lost French soil; in what was the first of many blood-soaked Western Front slugging matches, the Germans repelled the attack with some 400,000 French casualties and similarly-heavy German and British ones.
The British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had been the mastermind of the rapid British fleet mobilization and the subsequent blockade of the North Sea. However, even as he took these measures, designed to eventually end the war by starving Germany of her necessary fighting resources, Churchill knew that another strike was necessary against the German periphery, as the Western Front was already turned into the hemorrhage of men and arms it would remain for most of the rest of the war. In the beginning, his plan was for the obsolescent battleships that were not suitable for action in the North Sea against the formidable German High Seas Fleet to force the Hellespont (which was guarded by a fairly formidable defensive belt of many batteries and several minefields) and the Bosphorus, and sail straight up to Constantinople, put it under their guns, and demand surrender. Over time, this limited end run at the Ottoman capital, expected to bring in Greece, and Rumania, and possibly Bulgaria, to the Allied side, was transformed into a fair-sized undertaking, with Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, adding an extra amphibious landing if the naval attack itself did not suffice. On November 3, 1914, Churchill had already shown his hand by having the Indomitable and Indefatigable bombard the Hellespont guns in conjunction with some of the obsolete French ships in the Mediterranean, with the result that when the main operation began, with bombardments commencing on 19 February 1915, the Turks had a clear idea that the British were going to come in through the Straits, and they were feverishly preparing accordingly.
The British did not fire the first shot of what was to become the Gallipoli Campaign. That honor went to the Turkish battery at Orhaniye Tepe, whose German-made Krupp gun opened up on the Royal Navy destroyers probing the Straits. With that, the British battleships Cornwallis and Vengeance moved in and began to fire. The results on the nineteenth were not nearly as promising as the bombardment of last fall, and the British ceased fire and attempted another bombardment six days later. During the bombardment of the 26th, the Turks evacuated the outer defenses on the peninsula, and the Royal Navy battlewagons were able to sail further into the Straits. In the next three weeks, the British would try again and again to blast the Turkish batteries to splinters, but even the support of the superdreadnought Queen Elizabeth was not enough to cow or kill the Ottoman troops, nor were the raiding parties of Royal Marines that landed on the beach and attempted to destroy batteries or blockhouses. On March 18, the major British effort was launched.
The night before, a Turkish minelayer had added an extra line of mines in the Hellespont, which the British had failed to sweep in the morning as Rear Admiral John de Robeck took the fleet in. His sixteen battleships began to fire, and by mid-afternoon his ships had silenced the Narrows batteries. Beginning to pass into the Narrows themselves, six battleships were suddenly sunk or disabled, one by gunfire but the rest by the undetected mine layer. De Robeck, at wits end, and having suffered the Royal Navys worst losses in over a hundred years, decided to withdraw his fleet; unbeknownst to him, the Ottomans troops were at the end of their own rope, both mentally and supply-wise. As the British hurried out of the Straits, de Robeck planned to mount another attack later; unfortunately for him, the decision was taken out of his hands. Kitchener immediately began to organize landings, to be carried out in part by Australian and New Zealander troops just arriving in Egypt, and some with British men from home, part of Kitcheners New Army, the first real British mass army in history.
On April 25, the first troops from the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and the 29th British division disembarked on the Gallipoli (Chersonese) peninsula. The ANZACs, landing at Z Beach, were put ashore at the wrong place; instead of crossing the peninsula at its flattest and narrowest point, they would have to struggle up high, treacherous terrain well-guarded by the Fifth Turkish Army, under the German Liman von Sanders. Their initial landing was unopposed; as the ANZAC troops pushed further in, a division under a rising star in the Turkish Army, Mustafa Kemal (who had helped lead the original Young Turk revolt against the Sultan, Abdülhamid II, in 1908) moved in to block their path. Kemal began to throw his men straight into the battle, to hold the Australians from reaching the crest of Chunuk Bair. Thousands of Turkish and Arab troops were slaughtered by the ANZAC machine guns, but the Turks held the high ground. The initial landing, at least up north, had failed.
Further south, the British 29th Division landed at Cape Helles. At five beaches, lettered S, V, W, X, and Y, the British troops pushed off their boats quickly. At Y Beach, Lieutenant Colonel Godfrey Matthews of the Plymouth Battalion found a complete lack of Turkish troops anywhere from the coast to the village of Krithia. Due to confusion in the orders and chain of command, the British did not advance inland and didnt even fortify their landing site until 1500, when a Turkish counterattack, desperately gathered from troops all over the southern edge of the peninsula, nearly pushed them off the beach. By midnight the next day, Y Beach would be utterly abandoned by both British and Turks, the British because they were about to be pushed into the sea and the Turks because the landing at Helles proper was far more important. That landing, led by the Lancashire Fusiliers, a unit with a great history in the British Army, was made in the teeth of what little Turkish fortifications there were. Suffering horrendous casualties, the Lancashires would secure a tiny beachhead at W Beach that would develop into the main British base for the Gallipoli campaign.
After these initial landings, the Turks were largely able to hold the British to small gains. Tremendous numbers of dead on both sides didnt deter the British commander, Hamilton, or his Central Powers opposite numbers, von Sanders and Kemal. The British were repulsed at Krithia, in three massive battles that saw the British and Turks slaughter each other in close quarters without large gains at all by either side. At Z Beach, now dubbed ANZAC Beach or simply ANZAC, the Corps slowly began to gain ground. In August, another landing was proposed by the reinforcements trickling in, with the target of Suvla Bay. In conjunction with this attack, the ANZACs would launch their own strike at Chunuk Bair, a critical height that they had thus far been unable to seize. At Suvla itself, General Stopford, in command of the British troops, took too much time in securing his beachhead and failed to exploit his surprise and position. This had a horrifying result in that the Turks were able to concentrate as usual on the ANZACs and the troops at Helles.
On August 8, the New Zealand Infantry Brigade managed to take and hold the Chunuk Bair heights and repelled the halfhearted Turk counterattacks. The following morning, they were relieved by the Loyal North Lancashires and the 5th Wiltshires, two of the New Army battalions newly arrived from the Home Islands. Mustafa Kemal, at the Turkish frontline near Chunuk Bair, carefully prepared his counterattack, and early in the morning of August 10, his troops, which outnumbered the New Army troops three to one, formed up on the other side of the hill. Kemal gave the signal by raising his hand and walking forward, and the Turks slid up the hill in silent assault. But thousands of men cannot easily avoid detection, and a few of the Lancashire men noticed the scramble up the slope and opened fire. In a prolonged slugging match, the Turks were able to force the New Army men off the hill, but with severe casualties on both sides. The worst casualty by far was suffered by the Ottoman troops, though Mustafa Kemal was wounded in the abdomen and survived just long enough to direct the last attack on Chunuk Bair before expiring. At age 35, he had just been awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, and had recently been promoted to Colonel. For the duration of the Gallipoli campaign, he had been the darling of the Turkish press; his rapid rise was fueled by brilliant resistance at most of the major British attacks. The Turks had won the battle for the critical ground, but at the expense of a man who may have been the greatest Ottoman military man since Mehmet the Conqueror.
Following the capture and loss of Chunuk Bair and the subsequent failure of offensives at Scimitar Hill and Hill 60, the British entered a period not unlike those on the Western Front: waiting and trading shots with the Ottoman troops, across a deserted, mountainous no-mans-land where many a man keeled over from the heat as easily as he could be shot by the other side or blown up by artillery. Throughout the early fall, Hamilton resisted withdrawal, but he had little choice: the fall of Serbia and the entrance of Italy had opened up the Balkans far more, and the war leaders at home believed that such fronts as a new one at Thessalonika or in the Tyrolean Alps held more merit than did a stalled, failed offensive in the desert of Gallipoli. Serbia, which had resisted so valiantly in 1914, was about to come under attack from Bulgaria, which had begun mobilization in late September, and Germany, who was moving more and more troops east to take part in the offensives of Gorlice-Tarnow, where they and the Austrians cleared Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia, and this new one against the Serbs. In mid-September, the Allies began to withdraw troops from the W and ANZAC Beaches; these were to be transported to Thessalonika, Greece, from where the British and French could try to reinforce Serbia. The problem of continuing Greek neutrality was worked on by the British Government and that of the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, hero of Cretan independence. King Constantine, while connected to both sides by marriage ties, was more interested in a wait-and-see proposition to avoid the destruction visited on Serbia, but Venizelos appealed to his desire for the fulfillment of the Megali Idea, the Great Idea of reuniting the Byzantine Empire and restoring Greek control over Anatolia, reversing Manzikert, Myriocephalum, and the Great Siege of 1453. With a good deal of reluctance but also a good deal of motivation, Constantine began his own mobilization on 1 October, opened channels of military cooperation to Putnik in Serbia, and took control of the Greek army in Thrace for operations against the Bulgars and Austrians. British and French troops began to pour away from Gallipoli and sail into Thessalonika harbor.
Meanwhile, in Serbia, the situation was dire. The front had remained fairly inactive all year up until this point, because the Austrians and Germans under General August von Mackensen, one of the most brilliant German generals who had masterminded the Gorlice-Tarnow breakthrough, had been marshaling their men for a lightning autumn campaign. The Austro-German Fourth and Eleventh Armies, on the Danube River opposite Belgrade, would begin a massive artillery barrage, and cross the river on October 7. Four days later, Bulgarian mobilization would be complete, and King Ferdinand would send his men west into the Serbian flank and roll them up completely. Putnik knew something of these plans, but the Serbs could do little to counter them, as even a spoiling attack would be impossible across the Danube River against such a preponderance of force. Outnumbered two-to-one, the Serbian Army was only able to stand its ground and cry out to the West for reinforcements. The small Greek standing army and what Anglo-French troops there were at Salonika, under the French general Sarrail and King Constantine (still very lukewarm about the whole scheme) began to entrain and move north into Serbian Macedonia as the first week of October passed.
When Mackensen opened his attack on the seventh, the Allies had about 50,000 men in three divisions under Sarrail, positioned in the vicinity of Skopje, and 70,000 under Constantine, walling off the eastern flank in the Vardar valley across the border from Bulgarian Strumitsa. Putniks 225,000 men were initially concentrated mainly at the Danube crossings and on the northern part of the mutual border with Bulgaria, and resisted heavily against Mackensens incoming columns. Bit by bit the Serbs were forced back, and after three days Belgrade was reentered by the Austro-German troops as Putnik withdrew his battered command south towards Nish, where Sarrails extemporized Tenth French Army could provide support. The following day, King Ferdinands Minister of War, Nikola Zhekov, ordered a general advance by the Bulgarian First and Second Armies on Nish and Skopje respectively.
The Serbs had already gotten the Second Army to Nish, and a bloody battle ensued over the next few days as the Bulgarian drive was first blunted and then turned back by the battle-hardened Serbs. However, the lack of ammunition and other supplies wore the Serbs down, and in two weeks the Second Army had been driven just outside of Nish. The railroad Nish controlled was vital to supplying Putniks other troops, still engaging in a fighting retreat against Mackensens superior numbers. Without the railroad, the remaining Serb troops were unable to keep cohesion. By the end of October, hard pressed from three directions, Putniks main command, still northwest of Nish, was broken up in an attempt to get men out through neutral Albania and Montenegro. Putnik himself made his way south to command the troops still around the vital Nish junction.
Meanwhile, further south, the French had taken the brunt of the Bulgarian blow. At Kumanovo on October 15-7, Sarrail smashed the leading echelon of the Bulgar attack, and drove them back towards Sofia. Further south, Constantine began probing attacks after the complete lack of Bulgar efforts into Thrace directly towards Thessalonika, while continuing to gather the mobilizing army. As the Tenth Army began to push the Bulgars back towards their capital in true French offensive à outrance fashion, Sarrail began to complain about the lack of Greek movement. By the time Putniks army was disbanding and moving south in an effort to maintain some sort of Serbian armed forces, the French commander was apoplectic at what he believed was a complete lack of motivation on the part of his allies the Greeks (just as he had been furious when Sir John Frenchs BEF nearly vacated the Continent following the Battle of Le Cateau). To be sure, there was some truth to that: Constantine had been trained by the Germans and had strong familial ties with the Central Powers, and part of the relative lack of movement was due to his unwillingness to commit Greece to an immediate attack. However, the dilatory Greek movement was mainly due to the lack of troops under arms. Many soldiers had not yet reached the front, as mobilization had only recently begun from a state of near-peace.
These burning tensions in the Allied camp were averted when Constantine finally felt as though he had enough men to begin an attack in early November. The Greek First and Second Armies advanced vigorously into the Rhodope Mountains for a week, while Sarrails offensive bogged down and he began to pound against a stone wall in the mountains between his position and Sofia, his new objective. These Allied missions were far exceeding their real grasp, however. Despite the lessening pressure on what troops Putnik had left south of Nish due to Bulgarian redeployment to guard against Constantines advance, Mackensen still had over three hundred thousand men pushing against the Serbs. Fortunately for Putnik, thus far it was from the front and no flanking movements had been attempted. However, it was only a matter of time until the spring of 1916, when Mackensens Austrian allies would easily be able to smash Montenegro and Albania and perhaps pocket his army. For his part, Mackensen recognized the limited success of his attack and prepared winter cantonments, as did the other combatants in the Balkans.
Further north, the Italians had declared war on Austria-Hungary following the Gallipoli landings. The Italian politicians, led by Salandra, that wanted war with their erstwhile partner in the Triple Alliance, declared the reconquest of Italia irredenta to be their main goal. Those who attempted to oppose Salandras coalition were led by Giolitti, who embodied the neutralist movement, which included the Church and most of the voters. However, Salandra was in charge of the government, and his signature on the Treaty of London with the British guaranteed Italy significant gains in Austria and the Balkans at the conclusion of the war. Benito Mussolini, a Socialist who had opposed the Tripolitanian war with the Ottomans in 1911, now swung to the other extreme and advocated war against the Austrians, as did the poet Gabriele dAnnunzio, who organized mass demonstrations for war where people chanted Death to Giolitti! and called for immediate war. When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, following the attempt to force the Straits and the landing at Lancashire Beach, only a few of die-hard Giolitti supporters had voted against the resolution.
With nearly 900,000 men, General Luigi Cadornas objective was to force his way across the Isonzo River to Gorizia and thus to Trieste, the major Austrian Adriatic port, and thence through the Ljubljana Gap towards Vienna. The Austrians had a hundred thousand men on the front, under the overall command of Erzherzog Eugene; General Borojevic held the critical Isonzo River defenses. Cadorna wasted little time, battering in vain against the Isonzo defenses in the First of what would become many more Battles of the Isonzo River. The Second and Third Armies, commanded by Frugoni and the duca di Aosta, had attempted to batter their way in with double the Austrian troops; they failed. In a second attempt, the Italians massed even more guns to support the attack; that too failed. The Third and Fourth Battles, ending on December 2, were able to make not a dent in Borojevics defensive lines. For the loss of 180,000 men, Cadorna had gained exactly nothing although the Austrians lost nearly two-thirds that number. Isonzo campaigns were planned with even more intensity by General Cadorna, who expected the Austrians to break at any moment.
The previously-mentioned Battle of Gorlice-Tarnow had been the decisive battle of the year. Mackensens Eleventh Army, to later lead the charge against Putniks veterans in Serbia, had spearheaded the attack, which crashed through Russian lines in May and June. The Russians had yielded Przemysl and Lemberg, and Velikiy Knyaz Nicholas lost control of his armies as the Russians began to flee Poland. Throughout the summer, the Germans and Austrians rushed through the Polish plain, attempting encirclement after encirclement of the fleeing Russian masses; with what skill he had, Nicholas managed to prevent utter destruction and began to reorganize and rally his men, who finally managed to halt the Germans as the autumn rains fell and turned the Eastern Front into a complete quagmire. By the end of it, the Germans had smashed their way into Warsaw, Vilna, Brest-Litovsk, and Grodno, and the Russians were sitting in a demoralized mass on the Bug River. Nicholas, who had prevented complete collapse, was rewarded for his efforts by removal at Rasputins behest and his replacement by the Tsar himself, while he got demoted to the backwater Armenian Front.
Speaking of that front, it seemed to be the only place where the Allies were having definite success in 1915. At the beginning of the year, the Russian general Vorontsov had won the Battle of Sarikamish, halting a Turkish drive and forcing them back to Erzerum. Enver Pasha, Minister of War, was forced to return to Constantinople, where he began to search for someone to blame for the defeat of that winter, settling on the Armenians of the Caucasus. Vorontsov, as the American McClellan had before him, failed to pursue after his victory; he was replaced by Nikolai Yudenich, his former Chief of Staff, who had far more drive and initiative. Yudenich would advance into Turkish Armenia, attempting to rally support from the Armenian populace. In Constantinople, thousands of prisoners were freed to form a special organization to arrest and deport the Armenian intelligentsia, which was carried out on April 24. (The next day, British and ANZAC troops would land at Gallipoli, just near the capital, fueling further fear of the Armenians as collaborators and revolutionaries.) As the Russians moved deeper into Turkish Armenia, they were greeted with popular support from the Armenians, who launched a revolt inside the fortress of Van and held it for a month until the Russian arrival in May. In that month as well, the Ottoman legislature passed a deportation law forcing Armenians out of the war zone and its environs. Enver forced all Armenians in the armed services to lay down their arms and report to labor battalions, where most of them were summarily executed by the troops serving nearby. As the Russians neared the site of the Turkish victory of Manzikert, from nearly a millennium prior, twenty-five concentration camps were set up for holding and later exterminating Armenians.
The new Turkish commander on the Caucasian front, Abdul Kerim, prepared a counteroffensive against the Russians in July. North of the site of the Byzantine fortress of Manzikert, the Turks prepared an offensive with twice the number of troops as the Russians believed they had in-theater. Striking north of Lake Van, Kerims troops shattered a Russian corps of 22,000 men under Oganovsky, who had begun probing attacks in an area where the Turkish front was supposed to be denuded. After smashing through the Russians, the Turks began to pursue Oganovskys broken men towards Charachosia. Yudenich, having just learned of the situation six days after the event, quickly formed a mobile group, mainly made up of Cossacks under N. N. Baratov, to hit the Turkish left. Baratovs extemporized army broke up the disorganized, pursuing Turks at Charachosia (Turkish: Kara Killisse) and forced Kerim to withdraw. The remainder of the year saw the Turkish recapture of Van from the Armenians and Russians, the reassignment of the Velikiy Knyaz to the Caucasus Front (where he wisely left most of the commanding to the able Yudenich), and accelerating Armenian killings. In America, publication of these events in such periodicals as the New York Times and speeches against the Turks by former President Theodore Roosevelt and just-resigned US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan worked to inflame the populace, who sent several million dollars of aid to the Armenians.
