WW2 (Dutch Superpower)

The Second World War was the bloodiest and most costly conflict in Human History, involving the forces of the former Imperial and Defensive Alliances, led respectively by the Anglo-Dutch Union and the French Republic clashing on every continent except Antarctica. Over ten million Chinese soldiers alone died in the conflict and it saw the development of new and deadly tactics and weapons. It ended with the defeat of the Defensive Alliance, the beginning of the cold war and the growth of the Ottoman and Spanish Empires.

The Civil Wars of the 1920’s
At the end of the first world war the states of the defensive alliance had been torn apart by the war. In France and the Russian Empire the existing leadership had been torn up and puppet governments were installed by the victorious Imperial troops, Emperor Napoleon IV had been returned to government of France through revolution and the Russian Tsar had been thrown out by a coalition of parties, amongst them the Bolsheviks and the Agrarian Nationalists who had armed themselves with help from Finish, Polish and Anglo-Dutch troops, while the Spanish government was hanging on by a thread from threats by the Catalan and Basque nationalists.

These changes in government were not always met positively from other elements in the country. The success of the Nationalists and Bolsheviks in Russia was met by significant opposition from the Kadet and Decembrist parties with the assistance of the Japanese, initially democratically within the Duma and then after the collapse of the Coalition Government militarily. Over the course of a long two year civil war ,coming after only three years of peace and four years of war against the Tsar. The Collapse of the Coalition government in Russia was initially followed by a Menshivik, Kadet and Decembrist coalition that governed without the Agrarian Nationalists and the Tsarists, The Tsarists and Nationalists were massively successful in tacking control of the Duma and parts of the Russian North East. The Republican troops found themselves pushed back towards Siberia where the Japanese and Anglo-Dutch intervened to defend a coalition of moderate groups. Despite the assistance of the Imperial powers the moderates in Russia found themselves defeated by the Tsarists and the Agrarian nationalists who installed a new regime, officially led by the Tsar but unofficially led by General Denikin who ruled the Armed Forces with an iron fist.

Denikin almost immediately began a war with China in order to restore territories lost to Japan in the first world war before being returned by Japan to China as part of the Japanese Empires attempt to bring Asia back to the fore in international affairs. The Sino-Russian war was initially a massive success for the Russian Empire as Russian troops overran the Chinese military at the borders and threatened to take bejing from the fledgling Chinese republic. The success of the Russian army frightened the Japanese and the Germans who feared that a resurgent Russia might feel empowered to take on German territories in the east or challenge Japan’s dominance of Asia. As a result the two states bankrolled the Chinese republic and dispatched the Far East Fleet from Simpsonhafen and the Manchurian Army was dispatched by Japan to defend Beijing. Once the Russians had been turned back however the Chinese pressed the assault against them, Initially the Japanese and the Germans assisted them in pushing the Russians back into the Russian far east and some radical elements of the German and Anglo-Dutch governments considered using the Chinese as a tool to reverse Russian monarchism and nationalism and restore what they saw as the natural order of things. Realizing that this threatened to plunge the world back into a major war only ten years after the end of the first world war the Japanese and the Germans decided to intervene and force the two powers to reach a treaty, promising not to advance beyond there prewar boundaries.

The Chinese Republic had survived the Sino-Russian war but only just, the Chinese had been unified behind the desire to survive, in the months and years that followed the various factions that had been unified by the war broke apart. Initially a group of Qing loyalists allied themselves with the right wing nationalist republicans and the socialists to keep the Chinese state intact. Outside of this alliance the Chinese fascists controlled a sizable segment of the Chinese countryside as did the Communists. The Chinese coalition outnumbered the fascists and the communists combined but the coalition was dependent on bringing together a large number of disparate groups, amongst them a number of warlords who sought to break out from the banner of the Chinese State. The most important of these warlords was General Chang Kai-Shek who commanded an army of over a hundred and fifty thousand well trained soldiers and officers from the Whompa military academy, Although Kai-Shek's military might was significantly less than a number of other warlords and paled behind the numbers of the coalition government and its competing governments in the provinces Kai Sheck's military was significantly better trained than its opponents and it had access to armor and artillery as well as a sizable air force taken from the retreating Russians. In essence Kai-Shek commanded the most powerful independent force in China and it gave him a considerable advantage over his rival warlords in carving out a base in China's southern provinces. He dreamed of even vaster power though, seeking more than a small kingdom around his military accademy, He made an alliance with the nationalist leader Wang Jingwei and the Communist Mao Tsetung, bringing the two together under his national socialist banner. He convinced the two that rallied behind his elite military and with there public support they could overthrow the coalition government and restore China's world prestige. Relucantly the two threw there suport behind Kai-Shek, aware that his military strength provided the needed edge to there own mass armies. This combination of poulism and elite military forces proved deadly to the coalition, despite the best efforts of the coalition government and the assistance of some of the Imperial powers, most notably Japan. The Coalition hung on until 1929 when the new french government sent considerable aid to Kai-Shek's national socialists which proved to be effective in tipping the tide.

Revolutions in Europe
The major european powers had avoided the chaos of the late 1910's and early 1920's for a number of reasons. In France the new emperor recognised that he was distinctly unpopular and relied on his Prime Minister, chosen through elections to be the effective face of governance in the Fourth Empire. Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand, elected in Frances first free elections after the war in 1914 recognised the need to colaberate with the Monarcy, an institution he personaly despised in order to keep the country together while Napoleon the 5th struck up a friendship with a well respected staff officer Maxime Weygand who kept the army in line. The most dangerous of the new emperor's subjects belonged in two groups, the right wing Action Francais and the left wing Communist party of France. Millerand was able to bribe off the Communists by offering them a number of there goals, including high social security and low working hours. In order to fund this Millerand required large bank loans from the Anglo-Dutch banks and when they collapsed as a result of the stock crisis all loans were called in, Millerand government collapsed and the Action Francais desided that the time was right to strike against the Imperial regime. The intervention of Weygand's military preserved the Empire and Weygand installed himself as Prime Minister. His premiership worked closely with the Emperor and focused heavily on improving the colonies and keeping the country under control. In the end however Weygand found his regime under pressure from democratic groups who resented his dictatorship and the communists and nationalist who still resented the Empire. In 1928 Weygand agreed to allow democratic elections for the first time in eight years in which the Action Francais swept to power. In the resulting period the Action Francais sympathisers in the military, led by Phillipe Petain and there paramilitaries swept over the institutions of power and removed the Emperor from power. Weygand fled to his favourite colony, French West Africa with the elements of the military that remained loyal to him, hoping to one day re-establish the Empire.

Meanwhile In Spain the Cortes had maintained democratic rule despite the disaster of the loss in the first world war. For the most part this was achieved by exploiting the South American economies as well as using spain's considerable military, to keep the country together. However four years after the Amsterdamn stock crisis disaster struck, the Brasilian Empire decided that enough was enough and that they would prevent the Spanish from extracting debts beyond there pre-war levels. The Spanish responded by interveening militarily in South America but the war that followed proved deeply unpopular and dragged the Spanish economy into depression. After a number of military incidents Francisco Franco swept to power, removing all opposition and installing himself as the countries sole leader.

Military Buildup
Denikin in Russia, Chiang Kai Sheck in China, Petain in France and Franco in Spain had decided, independently that war was inevitable for the success of there nations. Denikin sought to regain Russian posestions in China and control over the eastern european client states, Kai-Sheck sought to restore Chinese prestige through defeating Japan and suplanting it as the dominant Asian power while both Franco and Petain sought to restore Colonial prestige and supplant the Anglo-Dutch as the major global power. As such they all began building up there military, Denikin in russia had an early lead in this, building up Russia beyond its limits from the beginning of the 1920's, unhampered by the the Imperial powers who feared the cost of a war with a country as large as Russia. Denikin's top down rearmament program was delt a massive blow however in the sino-russian war where the Russian military was defeated by the Imperial powers. Denikin decided to change track by aproaching the rearmament of Russia through a federal system, As a result the Russian military addopted a number of designs that sometimes filled the same role, the competition between the groups meant that the Russian military developed some of the best equipment in the world, even if had an excess of duplicate parts that weren't standardised.

Kai-Sheck, modernised quickly adopting western standards for his military academy at Whoompa and using Russian equipment that had been left behind during the Sino-Russian war. Reaching out to the Russian government the Chinese military developed equipment that was reliable and easily repaired, although it lagged behind the other major powers the reliability and mass produced nature of the chinese equipment gave them an advantage in land technology over the Japanese and even the Russians. The attempts of the Chinese to match the Russians and the Japanese in naval technology suffered however, despite investing huge sums of money China could never hope to match the numbers of the Japanese who also had the combined experience of fighting and winning, against the odds in three major naval conficts in the early 20th century.

Franco and Petain took similar aproaches to rearming but the difference lied in that Petain benefited from a french rearmament program that had begun under the Napoleonic regime and was continued under Petain, even though around a quarter of the French Military from all branches had defected to the Empire under Weygand the rebuilding under Imperial rule had left the french army as the second largest in western europe, behind only the German Army, During Petains military buildup this lead was extended and conscription reintroduced, bringing France up to Russian levels of military powess. Franco had the smallest base of all of the 1920's dictators but unlike the others had an active background in military technology, having been an engineering officer in the Spanish Army, While other military programs suffered from a heavy handed government interferance Franco allowed his military to operate free from obstruction, as a result the Spanish Army and Air Force, despite laging behind other countries in numbers fielded some of the best equipment of any interwar military.

While the dictatorships invested in vast military buildups the Democratic powers of europe and Asia slipped behind there rivals. Though there were efforts for militarily buildup amongst the democratic powers they were for the most part focused on naval expansion over land bound expansion. This was in part based on experience from the intervention in Russia, the Sino-Russian war and the Pacific wars during which the primary determing factor had been the relative naval strength of the powers involved. Even Germany, the major land power of the Imperial Alliance had focused itself on the Airforce, although its most powerful wing, the lighter than air Zepplins had been defunded. A doctrine had been developed amongst the Imperial Powers that power was best projected though the use of Airpower and warships. The result was that the imperial alliance powers lagged significantly behind there former enamies in the defensive alliance. The Anglo-Dutch and the Germans did realise, far to late that they were in danger and responded as such but they, along with a number of the other global powers were expecting a war in the late 1930's and were caught of guard when war broke out in 1933.

Calais
Of all the potential global flashpoints in 1930's europe the most important and threatening was the Anglo-Dutch, and former French port of Calais, having been taken over by the Anglo-Dutch at the end of the first world war the port had been fortified and turned into a cornerstone of the Anglo-Dutch defense of the english chanal. The vast military complex and batteries, when paired with there coresponding fortifications at Dover effectively forced all channel traffic to receive permision to pass through the straits from the Union or risk being blown out of the water by 22' inch naval guns. Calais itself was defended by a whole corps of the Union army as well as a garison division that manned the massive fortifications along the border with France. Conventional military wisdom held that calais was impregnabel form both the land and the sea, as it turned out however conventional wisdom, as so ofter was the case was useless.

In 1931 the French government had demanded the return of the German held teritories outside of Alsace Loraine and the German government, well aware that it lacked the ability to fight a major conflict ceaded the teritory to the french. This emboldened the French government and in the next two years a number of french colonial posestions were returned to the French. The end result of this was that by 1933 the french government felt comfortable enough that the union would back down over Calais, and return, if not the port and fortifications the town surrounding it. The French delivered an ulimatum, convinced that the Union would back down in the face of overwhelming french military might. The Union refused and the French fell into internal dispute over how to respond, French troops had the numbers to take the teritory but would take heavy loses. In the end Petain decided that France could not back down and tasked the young French officer, Brigadeer Charles de Gaule with coming up with a plan to take the teritory.

De Gaule knew that a frontal assualt was suicide, the fortifications along the border and the considerable military presence in and around the port would prevent a land based assualt. Confident that if the fortifications could be taken out the army corps itself would present little difficulty de Gaule decided to take a bold decisions. Under cover of night French transports would parachute it two divisions of soldiers who would use satchel charges to knock out the fortifications and allow de Gaules first and second armoured divisions to advance with coperation from the French Air Force. De Gaule presented his plan to Petain who signed of on it with the decision to increase the numbers involved, De Gaule had been reluctant to draw troops from the German or Anglo-Dutch borders, Petain guessed corectly that they wouldn't advance from there positions and trippled the troops asigned to the operation. De Gaule had been convinced that he didn't need the numbers but Petain insisted on extra security.

The operation began on the evening of the 21st of June with nearly thirty thousand troops dropping by parachute and glider into Anglo-Dutch territory, the French paratroopers landed and were successful in knocking out, first the power for the searchlights and then the various fortifications. With no power going to the AA batteries the French Air Force was free to conduct air strikes against the Anglo-Dutch fortifications and barracks. When the french Armour rolled in they faced little opposition from the shell shocked infantrymen. It was a deverstating introduction in what de Gaule and his 31 year old staff officer Philippe Leclerc called guerpide, an abreviation of guerre rapide, the french for fast war. In the space of twenty four hours Guerpide had proved its worth, De Gaule was promoted to General and the most well built fortifications in the world had been demolished and the Anglo-dutch empire had been delt a bloody nose it would struggle to recover from. An Emergency meeting of the Imperial alliance was called and war was declared on the French Republic, In short cause the Defensive Aliance, with the exception of Spain had responded, war had once more come to the world.

The fall of the Netherlands
As Petain had predicted the Anglo-Dutch and the Germans did not sally forth from there positions and allowed the French the time they needed to reorganise to invade the Unions mainland territory and Germany, The French knew that they could rely on the Russians to invade Germany and that this would disract the Germans from striking against the French in the west, as would the threat of the Austrians in the South. As such they could be fairly confident that they would be able to launch an assualt against the Anglo-Dutch in the Netherlands. This was still a daunting task, the Netherlands was defended by a full army group, numbering three hundred thousand men. For the most part these were conscripts but it included the Anglo-Dutch armies most advanced formations, the 4th Yorkshire Cavalry and the 7th and 8th Flemish Infantrymen. These three divisions were the best equiped in the forces and were some of the best trained as well, The leadership however left something to be desired, Field Marshall Gort, while well respected by his men proved inadequate to the task faced before him. On the french side the 3rd Army Group under the command of Marshall Jean Orleanis, was asigned to the operation, the spearhead however was General De Gaules newly created First Armoured Army. The French had taken massive risks to assemble there forces for the assualt, the first armoured army had drawn almost the entire armoured forces of the French republic into one formation, de Gaule was confident however, and Orleanis shared his confidence that the armoured spearhead would punch its way through the Anglo-Dutch fortifications and divisons along the border and swing north to split the Anglo-Dutch forces in half.

The operation began on the 5th October 1933 in the morning when the French Air Force launched a major operation to gain control of the skies over the Netherlands, like almost every other aspect of the operation this was a considerable risk, the French didnt really have the numbers of fighters to secure aerial supremacy over the Netherlands as the same time as preventing Anglo-Dutch bombers from launching bombing raids at Paris, Petain saw this as a necessary risk, the continued presence of the Anglo-Dutch army group in the Netherlands was a threat to the Northern French provinces and Paris itself and when compared to the limited cost that would be inflicted by the Anglo-Dutch bombing raids he viewed the losses as being aceptable. Luck was on the side of the French on the 5th however and the French strike bombers caught a large percentage of the Anglo-Dutch planes on the ground allowing a number of the fighters asigned to the operation to be redirected to defend Paris. The first french troops to cross the border smashed through the Anglo-Dutch infantrymen defending the border, a large number of which broke and ran. De Gaules force swung north to cut of the large pocket of anglo-dutch troops around the border and within a week the French troops were within twenty miles of the cut off point, the city, and port of rotterdam. This time though the French met serious opposition, the 4th Yorkshire Cavalry, alongside the 7th Flemish Infantry, the 1st Lancashire Infantry and the 1st Scots Armour, the first and so far only armoured division of the Union Army under the command of Major General J, Pesman. Pesman recognised that the French Salient attempting to cut off the the Unions forces could be turned against them if Union troops could cut them off and crush the french assualt in the process. Pesman's counter assualt smashed through parts of the French line, but before Pesman's troops could cut off the salient entirely De Gaules armoured troops swiveled to counter the Anglo-Dutch counter attack, in the battle that followed the French tanks, particularly the Renualt R35 proved themselves to be far more powerful than the Anglo-Dutch Crusader tanks, even the obcenely well armoured infantry tanks were volunerable to the French Char 75's anti tank gun. With Pesman's ad-hoc corps defeated Anglo-Dutch resistance crumbled and within another week French troops had crushed the Anglo-Dutch troops along the border while the remaining effective troops, numbering sixty thousand troops under General Edmund Ironside retreated back to the German border.

Germany Stands Alone
While the French had been having a great deal of success in dealing with the Anglo-Dutch in the north the Russians in the East and the Austrians in the south were having a far more dificult time defeating the Germans, Although the Germans lacked the numbers to defend and go on the offensive the German army had not been idle in the time between the first and second world war. The German military was the largest on the continent and was well trained and well equiped. This combined with a massive series of defense in depth fortifications in the east, the South and along the border with France meant that even for a Russian army that had been training for war with Germany it was still a challenge to not only break through the vast fortifications. It was in essence a repeat of the trench warfare of the first war, even when the Russians alocated enough forces to break through the German lines it meant alocating so many troops away from other sections of the line that they risked a german counter attack in those sectors that threatened to push the line back into Russia.

The German government had held off from fortifing the border with the Netherlands, after all the Union was Germany's most trusted ally and had been since the Napoleonic Wars. German troops trained regularly with there Anglo-Dutch comrades, there was a shared joint command for Union and German troops and they shared everything from military technology to battle plans. When French Troops had captured Rotterdam the Germans were now faced by the prospect of a hostile force on there northern border, Troops were redeployed from all fronts to make up the new Northern force under the command of General Ironside of the Union. November and December remained fairly calm for the German high command, new reinforcements arrived daily from the colonies, the Brasilian Empire and the Union although troops from the colonies had to travel all the way around Great Britain, the channel having been cut of by the French control of the guns at Calais. As a result the German high command felt increasingly confident that with the assistance of new troops from abroad and the asistance of there allies in Japan they would be able to first hold off the Russians and the French and then go on the counter offensive. Furthermore they were confident that the size of there country would prevent the french from carrying out an armoured sickle manouver such as the kind they had conducted in the Netherlands.

This was probably true but the French high command had a plan to counter this, in coperation with there allies in Russia and Austria. The First armoured army was split up into three armoured corps one of which was assigned to each of the three French assualts, in the Netherlands and Northern and Southern Alsace Loraine. The two groups in Alsace Loraine would join up behind the German lines, cutting of a segment of the German army before forming up to make army group south which would advance towards Bavaria where they would hope to distract enough German troops from the Austrian lines to allow the Austrian army to break through. Army Group North, the larger of the groups would break through the border and push towards Hamburg and then Berlin. The hope was that this would draw troops away from the eastern border and allow a concentrated russian force to break through the German fortifications and join up to make a push toward Berlin. It was the worlds largest combined arms operations to date and required intense coperation between groups from three diferent nationalities. The key to this coperation was an experimental Russian development by a man called Leonid Mandelstam that allowed the transmission of coded radio waves over long distances, these could be installed at army headquaters and orders transmitted on conventionaly from there. This allowed effectively instantaneous communication between officers at different locations and even of different nationalities, as each army HQ had a translation officer.

Go date for Plan X was the 1st of February 1934, although the winter might slow down the operations but the Russians and the the Austrians had a great deal of experience in winter tactics and the French had been training for the operation for a long time. On the morning of the 1st the French opened up there assualt in all sectors with a colosal artillery barrage. The speed and cordination of the Allied assualt shocked the german high command, there attempts to launch a counter attack with Germaies limited armoured forces were met and defeated by De Gaule and within a month Berlin itself was in french hands. General Rommel's troops were evacuated to Great Britain as were general Ironside's forces. On Febuary the 27th the Kaiser signed a peace treaty with the French ending the German empires existance as a soverign state. Admiral Raeder of the German Navy refused to except the peace treaty and alongside General Romels troops fled, first to Great Britain and then to the Germany colonies in Africa.