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| The Great European War | |||||||||
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| Part of German Unification | |||||||||
 Artists rendering of the Battle of Graz (1855)
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
League of Eagles
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Pact of Steel
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Mediterranean Concord
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Co-Belligerents
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
 Vladimir Dracultesti
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 Napoleon II
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 1.9 million
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 1.5 million
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
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~550,000
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The Great European War to most non-Europeans was a large-scale pan-European conflict that, during its height, encompassed almost all of the continental European nations, as well as many of their colonies in northern Africa and the Pacific Ocean.
The starting date for the Great European War is often debated among both politicians and historians, as well as countries alike. In France, many see the Prussian declaration of war against the Kingdom of the Germans as the start of the war, while in Burgundy and Prussia, many see the Rhineland's unrecognized annexation of Saxony as the cause of the war.
Etymology[]
The name “Great European War”, was just one of many possible variants suggested to name the conflict. It was coined by the Egyptian King Muhammed Ali II, when he was making a speech confirming that Egypt would remain neutral (although Egyptian volunteers and mercenaries would find positions in the front lines). Many other European historians and politicians outside of Europe have also used other names to call the conflict: "The Great War", the "War in Europe". Some notable German historians have called it the “Great War for the reunification of the Fatherland” or just the “Fatherland War”. A few independent historians and politicians have referred to it simply as “The War” or, during its cataloging, the "Second Napoleonic War”. In France, it has been recorded as “The World War”, due to there being war theaters outside of Europe (those being in Africa and Asia).
Background[]
Napoleon I returns[]
Rise of nationalism[]
Franco-Burgundian War[]
Alliances drawn[]
Mediterranean Concord[]
Maghreb Crisis[]
Progress of the war[]
The Belkan Invasions[]
The Belkan invasions across Southern, Central and Eastern Europe as of 1855-56 were devastating. The March of the Grand Army in 1855 and the Northern Army in 1856 were decisive in the war. With nearly 1.2 million men between the two army groups, the Belkan armies absolutely slammed both the Austrians and Poles. The Battle of the Frontiers and Graz were some of the first battles of the war and effectively proved that even after its devastating civil war and previous political divisions, the newly minted Second Belkan empire was the military powerhouse it had been known as previously. The Joint Belko-Russian invasion of Poland proved once again in the sheer mettle and willingness for combat the Slavic Great powers were known for.
Invasion of Austria[]
The Invasion of Austria was Belka's easy first target in the war. Being part of the Napoleonic German kingdom in some sense, Tsar Vladimir Draculesti saw it, as well as his generals, as the perfect first target for the 800,000 strong Grand Army which slammed into the Austrian frontier with intense ferocity. The Battle of the Frontiers as it is called saw the Army Group simply known as the Grand Army, face off against the Austrian K.u.K. Army, Austria's historic legacy army. The Battle of the Frontiers was not an unmitigated disaster as was thought, but overwhelming support artillery, as well as top-of-the-line cavalry pushed well through the ill-defended Austrian border.
The Battle of the Frontiers saw 30,000 Belkan casualties, and 25,000 Austrian casualties but the objectives were more or less secure and the K.u.K army was pushed well back toward the nearest major city of Graz. The Battle of the Frontiers, however, showcased to observers, the effectiveness of Belka's shock combat doctrine, innovated during the Belkan civil war to handle fortifications and close-quarters combat. The Austrian army was wholly unprepared to face the better led and much more well equipped Belkan troops one-on-one in close quarters combat, as Field Marshall Georgy Zaiyetsev leveraged his larger numbers to great effect. The failure of the Austrians to dig in and procure more modern weapons are considered some of the primary reasons for their resounding defeat just a few weeks later during the Battle of Graz.
The Battle of Graz was the first battle near an Austrian city, and the Army opted to face the Belkan army in the field rather than let such a large and historically significant city be turned to rubble, an act many Austrian commanders regretted later. The Belkan armies, while not in superior position, leveraged their superior small arms and artillery against the Austrians' dated cannons. The K.u.K. army now numbers 250,000 again after receiving reinforcements (with the main reserve to be held at Vienna) decided to fight a holding action at Graz in an attempt to buy time for either reinforcements from the Rhineland or a French Breakthrough to distract Belkan attention and force the Grand Army to draw down strength or turn its attention elsewhere. This ended up not the case as the Battle of Graz only bought the Austrian armies enough time to fight another losing battle, lose a major city, and lightly fortify Vienna. Rather than immediately seize Vienna, the Belkans offered a brief respite to the casualty-laden Austrian army which following a 50,000 casualty battle outside Graz saw its army decisively retreat back to Vienna. The Belkan armies - rather than pursue - opted to fan out and secure much of Southern Austria before the four armies of the Army group encircled Vienna on three sides putting the city under siege. With no help coming, the Austrian army dug in and conscripted every able bodied man in Vienna for its defense.
The Battle of Vienna was a decisive engagement around and inside Vienna. The cities historical defenses were no match for modern artillery however with 300,000 at their disposal and roughly eight months of training and resupply the Army was ready for its final stand. The Belkan armies fanned out around Austria taking the high ground nearby and keeping the city under constant bombardment. While this was underway, multiple battles were fought outside the city to try to present a Belkan encirclement. This ended up futile as the Belkan armies, after four months of intense fighting and two major battles near the city's edge on either flank, saw the encirclement complete, trapping roughly 200,000 Austrian troops and many of the city's inhabitants. The Belkan storming of Vienna was looked at with horror. Many expected brutality, rape, pillaging, plunder, mass death, but after a final decisive engagement in the lower wards of the city effectively broke the back of the Austrian army as 100,000 Austrians fought street-to-street against the core of the Belkan shock divisions. The battle of the Viennese lower wards saw 20,000 dead Austrians, and roughly 14,000 dead Belkans. However, with the remaining forces arriving in every direction, and only 180,000 men left to defend the city, the Austrian commander surrendered rather than see all his men die. In a shocking display of mercy, the Belkan Field Marshall Georgy Zaiyetsev, refused to execute the Austrian soldiers and instead confiscated their weapons and marched them back to holding facilities closer to the Belkan border, where the first elements of the Austrian Occupational army arrived to receive them.
Battle of Warsaw[]
The Battle of Warsaw was roughly the only major engagement of the 55-56 years of the war in Poland and a joint Belko-Russian task force engaged fully roughly half of the Polish army consisting of 150,000 which stood poised to defend Warsaw. The overwhelming numbers with lesser support in favor of Belka's Grand Army made taking the city a more taxing operation than the battles in Austria. However, the numbers offset left the Poles at a loss. With half their army stuck in Galicia and the other half refusing to surrender Warsaw the Poles stood resolutely and fought bravely for their capital. Spike pits, artillery traps, buildings being collapsed, the Polish forces held the Allied army off for nearly eight months before the Belkan and Russian armies finally stormed the city. The Polish forces fought bravely taking massive casualties and inflicting such as well. Of an army of 150,000 the Polish surrendered with just over 30,000 left. The Russo-Belkan armies, not up to par with the greatest armies, suffered extreme casualties with nearly 80,000 Belkan dead, and 95,000 Russian dead.
This marked the first unsuccessful use of Belkan shock tactics. In the face of fanatical defense and unorthodox tactics the Belkan Shock divisions and their Russian counterparts were met with fireboxes, zones of concentrated fire set up as a trap, booby-trapped buildings and streets, Warsaw was a veritable guerrilla fortress and the casualties prove the point here. The fall of Poland's capital, however, leaves only a moderately sized Polish army left, and effectively removed Poland from the war.
The Poles retreated from Warsaw with only 30,000 men left, and were trailed by a Russian army of 200,000 men. The last days of Poland as a combatant were in 1857 when Russian troops overwhelmed the 30,000 Polish defenders of Lodz. Those captured were put into POW camps guarded by a few soldiers of the Russian army, while a staggering 700,000 men arrived in Northern Prussia by foot and train for a general offensive against the German army in on the Elbe sector of the Prussian Front.
Burgundian Front[]
Throughout 1855, in light of the ever-growing tensions between the Prussians and Napoleon, Burgundian King Robert IV ordered the country to be put on a war footing, as any outbreak of war between Prussia and the Rhineland would likely bring in their respective allies of Burgundy and France. The Royal Army manned the fortifications along the French border, and the Navy was set to patrol the coast.
Dover Strait Clashes[]
The first involvement of Burgundy in the widening European war would come in March of 1855, when France attempted a massive sealift of one-hundred-seventy-five thousand soldiers to Napoleons Germany to assist it against the Prussian offensives. However, en route to Germany they made to pass through the Strait of Dover, the area of operation for the High Seas Fleet, Burgundy's main battle force.
The sailors among the Burgundian fleet were on tight nerves, many of them had either fought or lived through the last war with France, and Admiral Graaf Hendrik vun Lure had been given orders to engage any violation of Burgundian waters with force. French historians have maintained that the transport fleet never strayed into Burgundian waters, instead stating that Lure was the instigator of the action. While possible, Graaf Lures record as a level-headed commander, picked personally by Grand Admiral Cornelis van Roosevelt after his post war purges of the officer corps, puts this under doubt.
Whatever the case, on the morning of March 20, 1855 Lure recorded that the French fleet had passed into Burgundian territorial waters, and gave the signal for the fleet to man battle stations.
The Burgundian destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Dover Strait sparked Burgundian involvement in the Great European war.
Although recorded in history as the “Battle of the Strait of Dover” or “Battle off Calais”, it has often been called the possibly more-apt “Dover Strait Massacre”. Forming two lines of battle, the High Seas Fleet engaged the escorting French warships first, their explosive shells proving devastatingly effective. A shell from initial broadside from the Burgundian flagship SMS Herzog Guise seemingly found its way into the powder store of the French ship of the line Intrépide, causing a massive explosion that destroyed the vessel with all hands lost. The rest of the French warships fared little better, with the only other ship of the line also sunk, along with five frigates. Only three frigates survived long enough to strike their colors, and even they were deemed to damaged to salvage, and were thus evacuated and scuttled. The transports, now unescorted, tried to scatter but the frigates attaches to the Burgundian fleet managed to to force most of them to surrender. Several refused to, forcing the Burgundian ships to fire into them. The Burgundian Navy counted 100,000 prisoners from the surrendered transports. The number of dead has never been determined, but given the few ships that managed to escape back to France, the number of dead may be as high as 60,000.
In the aftermath of the battle, it became clear a renewed war with France was inevitable. As the fleet, and thus the first reports, returned to port, Grand Admiral Cornelis van Roosevelt ordered a telegram sent to the Royal Army headquarters in Mons, informing them of the situation. Once notified, Grand Marshal Lodewijk Slyke sent orders to all army commanders to act as though there is a state of war between France and Burgundy. And so, before the emergency session of the States-General had been convened, both the Army and Navy taken preparations for the conflict. Roosevelt’s actions were retroactively ordered by the assembly, as going around the Legislature to coordinate with the Army was technically a court martialable offense. By the end of the day, the States-General had passed, and King Robert had signed the declaration of war against France and its allies.
French Invasion[]
Breakthrough at Normandy[]
The Autokraat siege mortar prior to the artillery barrage that helped break the French lines.
By the time 1857 had come, Burgundy was feeling the economic pressure of its mobilized army. It was decided that a breakthrough of the French lines was needed to force France to the negotiation table.
This lead to a coordination with the Iberian forces. In June of 1857 the Iberian Army, supported by Belkan reinforcements launched an offensive on the French defenses in the Pyrenees. As such, France moves 150,000 men from the Burgundian front to the Pyrenees front. This would give the Burgundian army the opening it needed.
War of the Pyrenees[]
While much of the fighting in the Great European War was concentrated in Eastern Europe there was still significant fighting in and around the Pyrenees Mountains and the Western Mediterranean Sea.
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With French troops stationed almost exclusively along the Burgundian Frontier, in preparation for an invasion, Iberian forces from the West and Navarre Armies prepared an assault on the French Garrison in Navarre. With a total of 200,000 soldiers, the two armies stormed into Navarre on July 4th 1855, two days following the formal declaration of war by Iberia. These forces encountered only a token garrison of roughly 10,000 French Conscripts and quickly overpowered the defenders. Having thus secured the northern section of the region, French leaders in the south surrendered the 4000 remaining troops there. Iberian Sebastián Zapico, son of the renown revolutionary leader Maximiliano Zapico then ordered his troops to dig in for a French counter offensive. While French troops did arrive later in the year an attack never came.
French Occupation of Sardinia[]
Before the Iberian and Belkan fleet were able to deploy sufficient strength to the Mediterranean, a French task force managed to land roughly 100,000 French troops on the island of Sardinia. They fought the small garrison there to a stalemate, and following Iberian naval blockade of French resupply ships, continued the struggle with increasing desperation. By 1859, the year of the ceasefire, 20,000 of the French soldiers had died due to disease or in the frequent skirmishes between the garrison and the French Army.
The French Dig-in[]
After arriving in southern France in mid July of 1855, to prevent an Iberian invasion, the French Army of the Pyrenees faced off against a combined force of 450,000 Iberians supported by another 200,000 Belkan troops. Iberian reports from the Franco-Burgundian War suggested the French would make an attack on the Iberian line, but the attack never came. Instead, in the early months of 1856, French combat engineers, with labor from the conscripted French Army of the Pyrenees, began constructing a major set of trenches along the border.
The Battle of the Uhabia River[]
By 1856, Iberian Generals realized that the French would have to be dislodged before the completion of their heavily fortified trenches. Thus, in May of 1856 the Iberian Army of the West, supported by the Belkan-Iberian Expeditionary Force, a total of 650,000 troops began a concerted effort to drive the French from Gascony. The Battle proved indecisive, and after three weeks of bloodshed Iberian forces had advanced only 200 meters.
The Second Battle of the Uhabia River[]
Iberian Forces regrouped over the rest of the year and began a stead bombardment of the French positions. However, Iberian planners were still concerned that the French defenses could not be overcome if they were given enough time to prepare. Thus, in June of 1857, the Iberian Army of the West once again launched itself at the French lines. This time, more intense naval support indicated an early Iberian victory, however, on the 8th of June, 1857, a large French Army arrived to relieve the overwhelmed French defense and saw Iberian forces outnumbered for the first time. General Zapico chose to end the assault after the arrival of the fresh troops after gaining only 20 meters on average. From this point on the War of the Pyrenees would be a stalemate with both sides well entrenched and employing mass bombardment in an attempt to break the other. The greatest contribution of this front during the war was to force France to maintain a large standing army far enough from Burgundian lines that the Burgundian forces could breakthrough at Normandy. In fact, many Iberian historians consider the Iberian contribution to the war critical, for without the second front, France and the Rhineland could have jointly invaded and occupied Burgundy and then turned, now with increased industrial capacity, to face the Belkan forces making their way across central Europe.
The Prussian Front[]
Initial Battles[]
Operation: Chernobog[]
This was the first true test of fresh Russian troops against the modern European power of Germany. After the defeat of Poland in 1857 a mass concentration of Russian and Belkan forces with the spread out Prussian units gathered at Stade, across from Hamburg. Though Russian troops had been on the German front line before this was the first true test of the "Olive Army". For a straight week Russian artillery used up their vast stores of ammunition in a grand bombardment on the front line between Bremen and Verden.
Operation: Michael[]
Casualties[]
| Country | Total Casualties | Military Dead | Military Wounded | Civilian Dead | Civilian Wounded |
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| Total | |||||
| Belka | 1,152,278 | 676,455 | 473,570 | 1230 | 1023 |
| Britain | |||||
| Burgundy | 393,766 | 252,481 | 116,399 | 11,734 | 13,152 |
| France | 881,302 | 550,000 | 272,291 | 48,819 | 11,192 |
| Germany
(Rhineland) |
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| Iberia | 437,880 | 297,362 | 104,287 | 27,839 | 8392 |
| Prussia | |||||
| Russia | |||||
| Scandinavia |
Aftermath[]
Footnotes[]
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