The Start of the War
The Great War of 1911 started not because of illegal invasions, or illicit incursions, but because of economic tensions. With the addition of Hong Kong and Macau into the Kalmar patriarchy, and the seemingly endless amount of raw materials in China at their disposal, the Kalmar seemed completely unstoppable to the other Great Powers. The Kalmar colonial empire, stretching from Atlantic to Indian to Pacific, far outstripped that of the decaying Polish Republic and the powerful, yet constricted, Kaiserreich. In the Pacific, the mighty Korean Empire, with its Japanese allies, eyed the Kalmar holdings in the Pacific with greed and imperialistic desire. The mighty Amerika, fresh from a succesful war with Vestkysten, worried about ever-growing Kalmar influence in the Floridian League (and desired to take a chunk out of Kalmar Greenland and Iceland).
Over the course of the remaining time in 1910, the battle lines were drawn. The mighty Kalmar Union, with its eternal allies in the Polish Republic, versus the mighty German Reich, with its undefeatable armies, alongside their Amerikan brethren and a new-found ally in the Korean Empire.
It was not, however, the German-Korean Coalition (hereby dubbed the Berlin-Seoul Axis) that fired the first shot. It was the Persians, who mounted an assault on Hindustan. An old alliance treaty bound Kalmar into the war, while the Germans took the opportunity to guarantee Hindustan's independence and get themselves involved. And, thus, the Great War began; Kalmar & Persia v. Germany & Hindustan.
The First Year
Kalmar and German planners thought little of it. If the Germans marched north, they would be stopped at Fyn. If the Danes marched south, they would be stopped at Lubeck. What no one counted on was Poland.
Polish General Gorgi Zukovski was a mastermind tactitian and strategist, one of the foremost military minds of his generation. He had secured countless victories in the Polish Intervention of the Romanian Civil War, and in the colonial and socialist uprisings of late 1910. While the German military was mostly concerned about the Kalmar (as they had instituted a long series of hardened defenses along the German-Polish border), the Polish Army punched through the German defenses with paratroopers and concentrated artillery fire. The surprised Germans, caught off guard, folded; they were forced to pull back, giving significant ground to the Polish hordes.
In the Hindustani Front, it was going less swimmingly for the Allied forces. Persian soldiers had swarmed the Hindustani defenses, but were easily repulsed; the Hindus had learned from their mistakes in the earlier Afghani-Sibir War and fought them to a standstill. The stalemate culminated in the Battle of Punjab, with both Hindustani and Persian troops marching into artillery fire in enormous amounts. Nearly 800,000 men were killed on the battlefield that day - the deadliest battle of the war. It did result in, however, a Persian victory - without a strong Hindustani army to stand up to the Persian offensive, Pakistan was lost. In the east, Hindustani Muslims in East Pakistan rose up and pledged themselves to the Persians. With Hindustan flagging and the restricting Kalmar blockade on Germany still strong, Hindustan folded and accepted harsh peace terms, losing significant territory and disarming.
In Europe, the Polish-German lines had stabilized finally. Though the Polish forces were not nearly as capable on the defense as the offense, the addition of Kalmar artillery and armaments helped maintain the line. Though some of the gained ground was lost, there was little in terms of major battles as it settled into a stalemate. In Denmark, the intial Kalmar defenses in Schleswig had not folded as quickly as German military planners would have hoped. Kalmar naval dominance in addition to the high concentration of artillery behind Kalmar lines made Schleswig into a deadly chokepoint that cost nearly 70,000 German lives to take the southern half of; however, the northern part went smoother with only 40,000 casualties. The artillery was too close to fire accurately and the retreating Kalmar troops were largely so caught up in close fighting with Germans that Kalmar naval support could not do much. It resulted in a disaster for the Kalmar; of the 50,000 tasked to defend Schleswig and Jutland, only 10,000 survived and 7,000 of them became trapped in Aalborg.
As the Year of our Lord 1911 came to a close, nearly 1.1 million soldiers lay dead in the dust.
Year 2
A stalemate had been reached on the Kalmar-German and the Polish-German fronts. However, German envoy Zimmerman was dispatched to Novgorod and New Britain. Novgorod could acquire Finland and New Britain could reunite the Isles; the Kalmar would be too focused on Germany to do anything!
Two weeks later, the Republic of Novgorod declared war on the Kalmar Union in unison with New Britain. Poland and Persia issued a declaration of war the same day. . Poland, now fighting a two front war, was forced to pull significant numbers of troops off of the Western Front to deal with the Russians. The Kalmar Union did not have to worry as much as the Poles did; their lines were secured by the invincible Kalmar Navy and massive amounts of artillery. The threat to Kalmar Britain, however, was dire; there were not enough troops to mount a respectable defense, and the German submarine fleet mostly had the British Isles locked down. On the Eastern Front, Russian serfs threw themselves into Polish artillery while the well disciplined Kalmar Coreleans marched into Russia, meeting stiff resistance only around Novgorod. It was only a hasty - and lucky - counterattack by the Russian Home Guard that managed to keep the Corelean army far enough away from Novgorod so that it could not be seized. In the south, the Russians did not have the technology nor the tactical skill to break through Polish lines, and the Poles did not have enough manpower to dedicate to the Ostfront to break through the Russians.
In the British Isles, the New British Army had more luck. They had seized Ireland, virtually a Kalmar satellite at that point, with ease and annexed it; however, the British army was stopped 70 miles north of London, as the weary Kalmar soldiers dug in and the local populace, now fully considering themselves Scandinavians, took up arms to defend their motherland. German submarines and Kalmar destroyers were in constant conflict in the North Sea, seeing an average of one major engagement every few days. This constant fighting in the region, and the stability of the British Front, kept the Kalmar government from stripping troops from fronts where it was more desperately needed, such as the Russian front.
A counterattack by German forces in late November on the Poles resulted in a bloodbath for the Germans; nearly 100,000 Germans were killed trying to overtake Polish defenses and, though the Germans managed to push the Polish line back, it only gave them a few miles of land. After that - where 100,000 boys lost their lives in a mere 5 hours - neither side engaged in another offensive for the rest of the year.
Year 3
The Germans were not the only ones with diplomats. A Kalmar ambassador to Canada and Vestkysten (even if they were communist, they would make good allies), with promises of land and prosperity, brought the Canadian and Vestkysten armies into the fray. The Incan Empire also honored its commitments with the Kalmar Union, joining the war on the side of the Triple Alliance. With a fresh war with Vestkysten, plus Incan and Canadian arms at hand, the Amerikans began fortifying their borders. Their troops were made of German blood and their rifles of German steel, but they were horribly outnumbered; it was estimated that there were 3 Triple Alliance soldiers in the Amerikas for every Amerikan soldier. However, the Amerikan military and diplomatic machine were not insignificant; an old alliance with the Floridians was called in (along with a threat of invasion), bringing the considerable Floridian Navy to bear in the Caribbean and West Atlantic.
The Amerikan Army, no matter how valiantly they fought, could not hold all of their ground. The lands of New Jutland, just recently being incorporated into Amerika, were extremely difficult to defend, and a vengeful Vestkysten People's Army shattered Amerikan defenses in the region, managing to reclaim what was theirs before the first Vestkysten-Amerikan War before the Amerikan defenses could reassert themselves. In the north, Amerikan forces along the Maine border were pushed back after a lightning strike by the Canadian Mounted Infantry, to their defensive lines in Massachussetts. The only gains that the Amerikan forces managed to make were in the northwest, where lightly-defended Canadian lands were seized. Other than that, the Amerikan front was relatively quiet. The region was still unpopulated compared to Europe or Asia, and much of the land was inhospitable to travelling armies in the spring in winter.
On the naval side of things, Amerikan and Floridian ships largely closed down the western Atlantic. Though the Kalmar Navy was bigger and better, it was also operating on a larger number of theatres and was stretched extremely thin defending shipping through the North Sea, fighting German wolfpacks, and defending Oceania from Korean incursions. With naval dominance in the region, the combined Amerikan/Floridian fleets harassed Polish shipping around their African dominions and escorted ships to the North French Confederation, where their goods could be offloaded and sent through the Netherlands to Germany. It was a slow, inefficient, and expensive route, but shipping through the North Sea was too dangerous at this time due to the constant threat of German subs and Kalmar convoys.
In the Pacific, the 1st Indonesian Squadron (Kalmar) had scored a significant victory over Korean forces off the coast of Korean Phillipines, sinking several transports carrying nearly 20,000 men bound for Aceh. In Korean Japan, patriot rebels rose up, first peacefully, then violently, overthrowing the Korean garrison and pledging their allegiance to Japan. Korea, angry, demanded Japan return it; Japan refused. Not wanting to overextend their fronts any more than they already wore, Korea merely broke off their alliance with Japan.
In Europe, it was largely quiet; outside of a few minor battles where a few thousand were killed on each, there were no significant engagements. Each side quietly dug their trenches and prepared for the enemy's next move.
Year 4
As Year 4 of the war began, and the death toll continued to rise to over 7 million, the Germans called in their eternal ally; Austria. Earlier in the war, Austria had rebuffed Germany's attempt to get them involved, but Poland's efforts with Serbia fared far better. Earlier in the year, Bulgaria had attacked Poland, hoping to claim Romania from the Poles. Serbia issued a declaration of war, and Austria decided that then was a good time to enter the war, with Polish forces distracted in Germany. With startling speed, the Austrian army burst through Serbian defenses swiftly and, within a month, the entirety of Serbia was occupied & annexed. Unfortunately for the Austrians, the Polish Army had been waiting for an opportunity to strike; a blitz across Austrian lines left much of Hungary in Polish hands. The offensive, however, did not do nearly as well as the initial Polish offensive in the opening moves of the war; the Austrian forces halted the Poles and, with another front in Bulgaria to contend with, the Poles confined themselves to a largely defensive roll.
In Russia, the war was beginning to turn in their favor. Though socialists continued to march in the streets in protest of the enormous losses that the Russians were suffering, the Finnish Front remained quiet and the Polish Front was a success. Though Poland still held an advantage, they had been forced off the Caspian Sea and much territory in the south had been surrendered to the Russian hordes.
In Africa, things were not well for the European colonies. In British West Africa, revolts were already occuring as many young colonial men were shipped to Germany or the London Front, and as mines and fields were exploited for all they had. The secession of the African Confederation spelled doom for the British, as they did not have enough troops available in Scotland to sustain the London Front, which was swiftly eating up their manpower reserves. The British government hoped to stick it out one more year, to try and force a favorable peace settlement on the Kalmar Union, but with the colonial garrisons overrun and a fledgling state governing their African possessions, the war looked lost. New Britain accepted a peace deal with the Triple Alliance on August 9th, 1914, ceding all land south of Scotland and with Kalmar recognizing the British annexation of Ireland. With the loss of all English territories, the nation renamed itself the Republic of Scotland & Ireland.
Polish Congo, Swahili, and South Africa fared little better than British Africa. Nationalist sentiment, along with war exhaustion and general dissatisfaction with the colonial government, the African Poles and black Africans rose up, with hundreds of tiny states emerging from the ashes. Most of the Polish Army stationed in the Polish dominions had been called away to fight in Europe, and there was thus little to no resistance for the seccessionist movements. Eventually, the position stabilized, with 4 large African nations emerging dominant, if economically undeveloped and unstable; the Kingdom of Somali-Uganda, Republic of the Congo, People's Republic of Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of South Africa.
Kalmar, however, learned from the mistakes of Poland and Britain/Scotland-Ireland. The growing nationalist sentiment in Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand gave way to the dominion states of Australia-New Zealand and Indonesia, with the condition that Brunei remain under direct control of the Kalmar government. During this upheaval, a Korean assault rocked Papa New Guenia and many surrounding islands, with island garrisons not being able to hold against the attack. Several islands around Australia were seized as well.
Unfortunately for the Australians and Kiwis, the new government proved to be extremely corrupt and inefficient and, within a few months, the territories were reannexed back into Kalmar control; with the end result of MORE nationalistic tensions in the Kalmar Pacific territories.
Year 5
As dawn breaks on the Year of our Lord 1915, generals examine their maps and troops sharpen their bayonets. Life will reexplode across the world, and hopefully peace can be achieved after a staggering 10 million deaths in the course of the war.
