X) A Changing World
(1917-1948)
Reconstruction
Bringing the Southern states back into the Union proved to be a far more formidable challenge that first believed. Some in Congress wondered if it was even worth the effort. With the exception of the Bund, whose surviving top members were either executed or sentenced to long terms in prison, the southerners kept their own political parties. The Democratic Party, who was far more socially conservative than either Progressive or Socialist, saw many prominent southerners joined its ranks. This caused much discontent among the fiscal conservative Democrats, who broke away to form the Libertarian Party in the 1970s.
The level of poverty in the south, coupled by the devastation inflicted by a short and brutal war, forced the loyal Union states to subsidize reconstruction for decades. Northerners feared a black diaspora, were black refugees would flood northern cities. Many blacks did migrate north during the war, after the Confederate surrender, to take over factory positions abandoned by potential men-at-arms. Many of the Confederate blacks flooded black American neighborhoods, especially in Haarlem after war’s end. The industrial cities of the north also saw an increase in black population. There was a great concern over the fact that they might not assimilate into American society. These fears were unfounded, for the black southerners proved to be more loyal and cooperative than their white counterparts.
All white men within former Confederate states were subjected to loyalty tests. Those who would serve in the American Foreign Legions during the 1930s and 1940s were automatically made United States citizens upon discharge, but the civilian populace proved far more difficult to administer. If anything, it was Dixie, not former slaves, that took decades to assimilate into the fusion of European and West African (along with native influence) that comprised American culture. This was most extreme when southern Representatives and Senators returned to the capital. In 1920, as a symbol of reunification, the capital returned to the city of Washington.
Cooperation between State governments and the Federal Government was far from smooth. In the cases of some states, such as Virginia and Arizona, regions within the state were divided as to how to relate with the new reality. Western Arizonans proved more reliable than their eastern comrades. So reliable in fact, that the Federal Government divided the state in half, transforming the west into Jefferson Territory. A similar happenings occurred in Virginia. Lands west of the Appalachians were never happy with the Confederacy. Those counties formed a Constitutional Convention of their own, calling for succession from Virginia. Counties north of the Rappahanock River joined the convention. The end result was a new territory. Perhaps as one final slap to the Southern States, Congress named the new territory Lincoln.
In 1952, the southerners fielded their first candidate for United States President, South Carolina statesman Strom Thurman on the Democratic ticket. Though he carried the southern states, he was easily defeated by Progressive candidate, Dwight Eisenhower. Despite not winning a single electoral vote from the southern states readmitted at the time, Ike still had a plan to reunite the nation. His pet project was called the Interstate Highway and Commerce Act. When passed in Congress, the act allowed for the construction of a network of freeways to allow rapid transportation of military and commercial traffic across the country. In twenty years, over ten thousand miles of freeway were laid down across the restored United States.
In reuniting the nation, the Progressives continued with their closed border policy. With the task of integrating millions of former Confederates at hand, the nation could not afford to allow an influx of immigrants. The most extreme of hard-core confederates called themselves the Ku Klux Klan, the pro-white anti-black brotherhood started out as a social club, but soon devolved into a violent, terrorist organization, that still plagues the south.
The Union of Balkan Socialist Republics
During March and April of 1920, Belgrade hosted a convention of leaders from throughout the Balkans. Presiding over the convention was the man who started the Revolution; Peter Karadordevic. Rapidly approaching eighty years of age, his health was further taxed by keeping the unruly Balkans under control. It was through his force of personality that the Congress of Belgrade occurred at all. Despite the clear threat from outside powers, the Balkan nations could not come to consensus on how to approach it. Nationalist wanted to create a loose confederation, or even just an alliance. Karadordevic had other ideas. His faction of the Congress moved for political unification of the Balkans into what would nominally be a federation of socialist republics.
His staunchest ally in the Congress was the Croatian Ante Trumbic. Near the end of the Congress, he gave a speech that clearly outlined that if the Brotherhood of Workers did not hang together, they would most certainly hang separately. Furthermore, he was a Croatian, and Karadordevic was a Serbian. If Serb and Croat could put their histories aside for the cause of progress of man, then any nationality in the Balkans could. It was with this Congress that the nation of Balkans was established.
On May 1, 1920, the delegates signed the Articles of Federation, a document that forged a union between the Balkan states. It was on May Day that the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was founded. This is not to say that the Congress was without debate. Many resisted unifying the Balkans and surrendering their sovereignty to Belgrade. The loudest of the opposition also failed to show up the day following their anti-union speeches. It is believed that the I.B.W. quickly purged these delegates; the first of many purges that would plague the communist Balkans.
After the articles were signed, and quickly ratified by the communist parties in their respective nations, the new Supreme Soviet elected its first Premier, none other than the General-Secretary of the I.B.W. Peter Karadordevic. His reign was short lived; in late 1920, he suffered a massive stroke, and shortly into 1921, the first Premier died, leaving a power vacuum that threatened to tear the Union apart. Ante Trumbic quickly promoted himself to General-Secretary, and Premier of the UBSR.
The Karadordevic legacy was more than uniting fractured peoples. His pet project; government control over food supply, is credited for diverting famine on more than one instance during the 1920s and 1930s. The plan called for the state to purchase excess grain while prices were low, and stockpile it. When prices rose or production dropped, the excess grain was dumped on the market, thus controlling prices. State control over farms, and collectivization of said farms was also hoped to maintain high productions. Though the process of collectivization caused shortages, it was the Ministry of Health that prevented famine from ravaging the Balkans.
More damaging to the populace of the Balkan Union than collectivization, was that of crash industrialization during the late 1920s and ‘30s. To industrialize, the I.B.W. virtually enslaved the people it claimed to liberate. Under the regime of Trumbic, the first step in industrialization was undertaken. To build factories, one must be able to deliver raw material to the factories. With this in mind, Trumbic designed plans to improve, or rather create, an infrastructure uniting all the Balkan nations. Tens of thousands of kilometers of rail and road were laid down between 1922 and 1927. To supply the road gangs with a constant stream of workers, Trumbic ordered a series of purges to weed out counter-revolutionary elements.
The first to be sent to forced labor camps were everybody who benefitted under the old regime. Oddly enough, this included the very middle class that supported the Revolution to begin with. Anybody with ties to the old regime’s administration were immediately sentenced to hard labor. Tax collectors were simply shot. Some of Trumbic’s own comrades found themselves in labor camps. Dusan Simovic was sentenced in February of 1940, and would have likely died in the work gangs, if not for the counter-revolutionary crusades of the 1940s.
Conditions in the road gangs were brutal for even the healthiest of individuals. One stretch of highway through the Carpathian Mountains became known as the Road of Skulls, for the numbers of workers who died during its construction. During the winter of 1925, on a road that would connect the Transylvanian BSR with the Wallachian BSR, some twenty thousand workers died of exposure. Some of the dead’s only crime was being born to parents who worked for the Ottomans.
No matter how bad the road gangs were, the miners suffered even worse. Those sentence to the mine seldom lived to see freedom. In the coal mines of the Bulgarian BSR, a tight quota system was in use. Those who did not meet their quota of coal did not receive their quota of ration. When they did meet their quotas, the quotas were often increased due to mine management believing the miners could worker harder. Similar quota systems were used in the forestry gangs of the Hungarian BSR.
By 1927, steel mills sprung up across the Balkans like mushrooms. Workers who toiled in these mills lived longer lives and received better treatment, but it was just as hazardous as the mines. Safety inspection was unheard of, and when workers suffered injury they were removed and replaced. In the Novi Sad Iron Works, an average of one worker per week was killed during 1928. Oil production was not as hazardous on average, but an explosion at the Ploesti fields claimed the lives of some three thousand workers on September 11, 1929.
Five-Year Plans
Trumbic’s first five-year plan called for the full scale industrialization of the Balkan Union. Before the Balkan Union was founded, some ninety percent of the Balkan population worked in agriculture. The first five-year plan in 1922, called for this to be reduced to fifty percent by 1932. The forceful relocation of hundreds of thousands of peasants further disrupted food production. To compensate, the second five-year plan called for mass production of agricultural machinery to replace the lost workers. Though production dropped, government food rationing prevented famine from taking hold. The time between 1922 and 1932 were a lean time for the Balkans.
Furthermore, Trumbic called for the production of steel to reach one million tonnes by 1932. Coal and oil would both reach two million by the same year. Electricity was planned to be in fifty percent of Balkan homes by 1932, but this quota fell short. In 1932, a purge of the Ministry of Energy removed some of the Balkan’s more capable administrators. Dams were built across the Balkans, leading to a further displacement of peoples. These were rounded up and sent to training camps, were they would be trained in industries such as steel, fabric and machinery.
The third five-year plan, 1932 to 1937, called for a five hundred percent increase in the production of agricultural machinery. By 1936, each collective farm had at least one tractor. The tractors were of poor quality, and a trained mechanic had to be provided by the state. Upon learning of the design flaw in the Model 1931 Tractor, Trumbic purged the entire design board of Mikail-Grosniv Industrial Bureau. Along with farming equipment, the production of automobiles was to increase by two hundred percent.
In the same five-year plan, Trumbic called for the establishment of a military-industrial complex in the Balkans. Before 1932, the Balkan Union had no armor, a few Great War aircraft, some rusting ships based in the Greek BSR, and only limited manufacture of bolt-action rifles. Several bureaus were established, chief among them was the Belgrade Arsenal. The Belgrade Arsenal was expected to deliver fifty thousand pieces of artillery by 1937. It exceeded it quota by one-point-three percent.
Trumbic’s death in 1938, disrupted the fourth five-year plan. During the months of July and August, members of the I.B.W. vied against each other for power. The position of Premier devolved into a more ceremonial role, where a new premier would be elected out of the Supreme Soviet once every two years. The real power remained the general-secretary. By 1939, Ivan Mihailou, from the Macedonian BSR, seized control of the Party. His reign would be the shortest. Within a year, the first of the Crusades against communism would strike the Balkans.
Life under the New Regime
For the peasant in the Balkans, the Balkan Union offered some improvements in their quality of living. By 1940, electricity and indoor plumbing were in a majority of towns and all the cities. Some of the positive acts of the I.B.W. is to enact universal education in two dozen languages across the entire Union. Education became mandatory, and the literacy rates tripled from 1920 to 1930. Along with education, the state provided health care. Before the Revolution, most Balkans relied upon folk remedies and superstition to combat ailments. By 1940, modern medical care was universal, albeit a generation behind the rest of Europe.
For the average Balkan, the State and the Party was everywhere. The State not only planned the economy, but the way its people would live out their lives. Religion, which is diverse in the Balkans, was suppressed for that very reason. Churches and mosques were seized by the states and converted into schools, courthouses and even offices for the secret police. The Haiga Sofia in Constantinople became the headquarters of the Red Navy. With ancient beliefs suppressed, the people only had the state to look to for guidance.
For food and other daily supplies, the average Balkan was forced to wait in queues for hours just to get their weekly ration of meat or dairy, or even for a new pair of shoes. The same waits accompanied a Balkan no matter where they went. If they wished to visit the doctor, they had to wait in line. If they wished to ride the rail, the same. A Balkan spent much of their life waiting. The rest was spent worrying. They dared not complain, for nobody was certain whether the person in the next flat was an informant. The secret police ran off anonymous tips. Sometimes the threats were real, but more often or not, they were imagined by the informant, and the state (especially under Trumbic) was more than willing to believe the worse. A Balkan’s life was a mixed blessing compared to their parents; a higher standard of living, but quite possibly, a shorter life.
Pre-war Year
The Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was still a third-rate military power by 1940. Despite Trumbic’s attempts to force industrialization, the Union still lacked the industrial power to match any of the world powers in military hardware production. The Belgrade Arsenal produced more than enough artillery pieces to defend the frontier, however, ammunition production was lagging due to Trumbic’s purges. The practice of mass executions of entire departments do to lack of satisfactory work was halted by Mihailou. He saw the logic in keeping experienced hands, even if they do error from time to time.
At the start of November, 1940, the Red Navy had refitted the ships captured during the Balkan Revolution. Only a handful of new ships were built, no larger than a destroyer. Trumbic did not believe any war would be a naval war. Instead, he focused industry on Army production. This includes the Macedonian Tank Works, which produced some seven thousand Red Star tanks. The Red Stars were of high quality, the Red Army lacked the tank doctrine to use them properly. The Tank Works survived the Crusades, despite air raids from all sides, and continued to produce tanks for all sides during the Balkan Wars.
At the time of invasion, the Balkan Union’s GNP was a third of that which Germany possessed. Multiple embargoes against it hurt its economy. It did have trade with Kurdistan, Armenia and the Arab Republic. By 1940, it also had diplomatic relations with most countries, the notable exceptions being lack of ambassadors from Madrid, Paris and Berlin. Its largest export was the Revolution itself. Advisors from the Balkan Union were embroiled in the Chinese Civil War, supply Mao with weapons and aiding in combating other factions and the Japanese.
Overall, by the time of the German Invasion, the Balkans were finally starting to climb out of the Dark Ages and join the modern world.
Reforms at Home
During the Great War, the lack of cohesion in Commonwealth Armed Forces greatly distress King Frederick III. How was the Commonwealth suppose to survive a serious threat if each nation had its own army, navy and now air force, along with independent chains of command. In 1918, Frederick launched his own campaign to fully integrate the Commonwealth’s military. The various Staaten-Generals around the Commonwealth resisted the idea, arguing their militaries were internal affairs. However, the King argued that since the Commonwealth had a united and common foreign policy, including declaring war, then it should have a common and united military.
The King had his allies across the Commonwealth. The King always has allies. No matter the state, whether it be Brazil, Transvaal, India or even the United Provinces, there were always those Electorates and Senators that looked toward their common monarch (though minus the monarch part in the Boer Republics) for leadership. Though political parties were illegal in some states, that did not stop ‘monarchist’ organizations from forming.
More nationalistic elements opposed these so-called Monarchists. They claimed that by integrating the Commonwealth’s armed forces, they would be stripping the member states of their sovereignty. First the military, then taxes and domestic laws. Where would the Commonwealth Assembly stop? Until all the members were reduced to colonies of the Hague? The King had no desire to strip his kingdoms and empires of their status as realms. Brazil and Ceylon would keep their own academies, and all the states would have their militias, but the Commonwealth as a whole could not afford to have its armies divided along national lines.
The United Provinces were in favor of it, if for no other reason than it gave them a vast number of recruits to use in defense of the Provinces. That alone made the proposal suspect. Brazilians had little desire to be stations in the Provinces, and the Indians certainly did not wish to defend their former overlords. Strangely enough, all the Boer Republics were in favor of integration. The Boers might have been a powerful voting block, if they could ever agree on anything. During the Great War, Kapenstaaten refused to send soldiers to aid Johannestaaten in beating back British raids. If all the states were to pool their military manpower, then perhaps they could better defend Commonwealth members.
When the vote came up before the Commonwealth Assembly, there were eight in favor, and India and Brazil opposed. Though against it, once the Act of Integration and Armed Forces Reform was passed, they grudgingly abided by it. By 1920, the Commonwealth established a common chain of command, with the King at the top, and various generals stations around the world. It was not until 1922, that the actual armies began to pool their resources, and merged into new divisions. The 1st Royal Guards Division, based in the County of Holland, and under the command of the Count, lost half of its Netherlander manpower, and saw it replaced by an influx of Brazilian, Ceylonese, Boer and Indians soldiers. Thanks to Frederick’s ‘If One Falls, the Next Will Follow’ propaganda campaign, not all soldiers were dissatisfied by the monumental shuffling of up to two million men at arms throughout the 1920s.
The navies had an easier time of integrating. Aside from shuffling of crews on board the ships, and transfer of those ships, the only cosmetic change was that the nations flag was lowered to second place, and the Commonwealth flag fluttered at the top. Also, gone was the HMS, to be replaced by DCS (Dutch Commonwealth Ship). Unlike the armies, the navies’ territorial boundaries were the oceans of Earth. Brazilian and Ceylonese ships could sail into each other’s harbors just as easily as they could Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Integrations of Commonwealth forces lasted until 1935. Frederick III saw his visions of a united Commonwealth Armed Forces fulfilled just shortly before his own death.
Kingdom of New Holland
By 1919, the colony of New Holland grew substantially from its gold rush days. Gone were the mining camps, the saloons and the outlaws. When the gold was either depleted or taken over by companies, the rift raft eventually blew out of town, looking for the next big strike. Gold was again discovered in American and northern Canada, and the adventures chased after it. Gold changed everything in New Holland. Before its discovery, the inhabitants were content just herding their sheep and living the simple life.
After its discover, New Holland’s economy rapidly expanded and transformed the backwater province of the Indonesian colonial department into a separate entity. Revenue from mining was spent to build roads and rails, to provide water and irrigation and generally improve the colony. It had been a long standing Dutch philosophy stating government’s only real duty was to instigate public works, roads, aqueducts and so on. That was precisely what New Holland did, and its standard of living surpassed the rest of Indonesia, with the exception of Java.
By the end of the Great War, in which many New Hollanders fought with Indian and Ceylonese divisions against the British in both India and Australia. Fighting in their own backyard, the New Hollanders felt they earned their right to be a full member of the Commonwealth. New Holland was no longer satisfied with the limited self-determination granted to them by the United Provinces. They now demanded full self-governing as a realm within the empire.
In late 1918, delegates met in Apeldoorn to draft a constitution for New Holland. For the most part, these delegates were the higher ranking New Hollander officers along with a few influential members of the rural society. The prospect of the military writing a constitution left many in the Hague unsettled. After hearing about the convention, the United Provinces send their own delegates to oversee the writing, to ensure the constitution was up to Commonwealth standards.
To the observer’s surprise, the New Holland Constitution was far more progressive than any other. It called for equal rights for all inhabitants of New Hollands, European and Aboriginal, citizen and resident alike. It went even further, making New Holland the first member of the Dutch Commonwealth to insure universal suffrage for all citizens over the age of nineteen. Universal suffrage in New Holland would have ramifications across all Commonwealth members across the decade of the 1920s.
Satisfied that the New Hollanders exceeded expectations, the observers returned home, bringing with them the petition to join. In July of 1919, summer in the Hague yet winter in Apeldoorn, the Commonwealth Assembly approved New Holland’s admittance into the Commonwealth and bestowing to it statehood, full self-governing and making it another realm within the empire. The biggest debate within the constitution convention was what to make New Holland. There was little desire for a republic and much love for the King. Some believed New Holland was too small to be a Kingdom and proposed adopting a Principality, yet Frederick III was not a man to take a demotion. September 7, 1919, Frederick visited Apeldoorn in a tour of the Indian Ocean, and was crowned King of New Holland by its own Staaten-General.
Amendments
The biggest change in Commonwealth society, for all the states (except India, which was later in following) was giving women the franchise. For most of the history of the United Provinces, it was only the men who could vote, and not until the post-Napoleonic constitution that it was guaranteed in writing for all men. Women began to wonder that since they were citizens as well, why could they not vote? After New Holland became a fully independent member of the Dutch Commonwealth, the female population of other states looked on with envy as their counterparts on the Australian continent passed their votes.
Between 1920 and 1926, each member, with the exception of India, passed amendments to their constitution allowing for universal suffrage, starting with the United Provinces in December of 1920. India, given its deeply patriarchal history and conservative nature, has always been one of the slower members to progress with the rest of the world, but not without resistance from the Princes and Mullahs scattered across the subcontinent.
In the United Provinces, a series of colonial acts were passed, granting more self-governance to the colonies. By the time Frederick took the additional title of King of New Zealand in 1922, it was clear to those in the Hague that all the colonies would one day gain independence and membership into the Dutch Commonwealth. The Dutch believed it better to give the colonists the tools and experienced advisors to make it possible. For the most part, the colonies welcomed self-governance. They did not have full control over their own internal affairs, still having a governor-general appointed by the Staaten-General, and still subject to taxation from the Hague.
Iceland; the Nineteenth Province
By 1927, the future status of the closest of the United Provinces’ colonies, Iceland, came into question. Originally settled over a millennia ago by Vikings from Norway, the island was inherited by William II after the death of the last Danish King in the Seventeenth Century. For centuries, the Dutch gave little regard to the possession, using it as an excellent fishery and before the advent of petrochemicals, for whaling stations.
When Denmark regained its independence after the Congress of Vienna, the United Provinces held on to the island, along with Norway. However, Norway was one of the United Provinces immediately after the Act of Union in 1705, while Iceland remained a colonial possession, with no self-determination or regional government to mention. Its proximity to the Hague made it easy to control every aspect of the island’s management directly, without the need to appoint a governor-general.
Along with no consent over their own rule, the Icelander also lacked any say in the issue of taxation. Though low in population, Iceland paid its share of taxes to the mother country. Though the quantity of taxes were low, the key fish tax impacted the lives of everyone on Iceland. By the time distant New Zealand obtained independence, the Icelanders were looking forward to their own future. Should they not be independent.
Iceland lacked the population, even compared to the five hundred thousand inhabitants of New Zealand, to ever hope to remain a viable nation. If the Dutch did not rule over it, then only a matter of time would pass before the British or Swedes took possession of the island. Its location in the North Atlantic, along with Greenland and the Province of Norway gave the United Provinces a half-ring around Britain and a stranglehold on the much larger Swedish Empire. The Staaten-General would not give up control over Iceland.
The Icelanders could not very well stop eating fish, however, they boycotted any imports for the Dutch Commonwealth. Since Commonwealth ships were nearly exclusive in importing commerce onto the island, 1927 became a year of shortage in Iceland. With only fifty thousand inhabitants, Iceland could not hope to even scratch the Commonwealth’s economy, however traders were vexed enough by the boycott that they went to the Hague and petitioned the Staaten-General to force open the door.
To do so would likely cause the volcanic island to erupt into violence. With the exception of the Boer Wars, the Dutch nations have evolved without bloodshed. The current members of the Staaten-General were not about to be the first to revoke the sacred Dutch right to protest. However, they could not simply appease the Icelanders, for concern it might encourage other colonials to start their own embargoes. Iceland might not mean much to the economy, but if Formosa or Java did the same, it might prove problematic.
It was Otto, Duke of Bergen, who came up with the proposal in the Senaat. His own Province, Norway, was once a simple crown possession until it was admitted as a Province. Grant it, Denmark-Norway was an entire nation in personal union with the United Provinces, and Provincial status was stipulated in the treaty, whereas Iceland was but an island in the Atlantic. Otto proposed that Iceland should either be made a Province or annexed by Norway. The annexation was immediately rejected by every other member of the Senaat. For three hundred years, the First Chamber of the Staaten-General struggled to ensure no Province became overwhelmingly more powerful than the rest.
Before the decision could be made, the issue of who would represent Iceland in the Senaat was razed. Would Otto take the additional title of Duke of Iceland? No member of the Staaten-General would approve that. There was nobody qualified to take on such a title. The King might bestow it upon one of the generals or admirals during, but the Great War produced no Ernst van Bohr or Michel de Ruyter.
It was the Regent of Liege who came up with an acceptable compromise. The Bishopric of Liege had no hereditary ruler. Thanks to the deal made between the Bishop and Maurice van Oranje, Liege was eventually permitted to elect a regent. Perhaps Iceland should be the same. Whether the regency would be for life, or a limited term would be left for the Icelanders to decide. In 1927, the Staaten-General agreed to make Iceland the second nineteenth Province. The Icelanders, however, took an additional two years to form a government, elect a regent and gain admittance into the United Provinces.
Kingdom of Abyssinia
Between 1915 and 1916, the time of Dutch involvement in the Great War, some 50,000 Abyssinians served in the Royal Netherlands Army. Of those fifty thousand, only ethnic Dutch and Somali were allowed to serve overseas. They served with distinguish in Europe during the Siege of Mons and further action against the French. Ethiopians and other ethnicities in Abyssinia were stationed in Abyssinia itself on garrison duty. This was a great disappointment to many young Ethiopian men who wished to serve the crown and to seek adventure in the nightmare known as the Western Front.
The reason for this decision was that the Netherlander and Brazilian Army brass had great concerns the Ethiopians might dessert. The presence of British colonies all along the Abyssinian frontier lead some generals to believe Ethiopians might flock to the British in hopes of regaining their lost homeland. Little did the General realize, that by 1915, most Ethiopians were quite content with their Dutch rulers, and many began to consider themselves Dutch. More over, the Ethiopians and other natives liked the British even less than the Dutch. At least with the Dutch, the natives were left their own religion, and not subject to missionaries.
The entry of the Dutch Commonwealth into the war severely hampered the Abyssinian economy. Once war was declared, the British closed the Red Sea from the north and the Dutch from the south, effectively cutting off all commerce into the area. Any ships that did set sail were subject to attack by commerce raiders, or even pirates flying the colors of one Entente member or another. In respect to the Royal (Dutch) Navy, Ethiopians were allowed to serve, though their percentage was always kept in the single digit per ship. They served enthusiastically.
The closing of dams in the Ethiopian Highlands cut into the flow of the Blue Nile, and had devastating impact on Egypt. The missing of the annual flood in 1916 cause small scale famine across the country, forcing the British to divert resources to feed the populous and keep them from rising up during London’s time of crisis. This also lead to an abortive attempt by the British to invade Abyssinia and take control of the dams. Dutch units based along the northern frontier entered the Sudan and handily defeated an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of Sir William Haig, taking some five thousand prisoner.
The southern border of Abyssinia remained quiet through the whole war, with no official action taking place. The British did, however, encourage natives to raid across the border. In response to this, some enterprising Dutch and Somali living along the southern coast, took to the sea in their boats as “privateers”. In reality they were little more than pirates, raiding the East African coast. As long as they did not attack Dutch shipping, the Hague looked the other way. However, after peace was declared, they still continued to raid, and had not their dens burned out by the Commonwealth Navy until 1920.
Following the conclusion of the Great War, the Hague enacted a program to make Abyssinia a self-sufficient colony, requiring no imports in order to function as a modern nation. Through the 1920s, various industrialization programs were pushed through the Staaten-General. Canneries were constructed across Abyssinia to boost the coffee industry. Powered looms were built to turn wool from sheep and goats into clothing on a massive scale. Steel mills were built to churn out the steel for railroad tracks yet unlaid.
Along with becoming self-sufficient, attempts were made to have Abyssinian produce cheap products for consumption in the United Provinces. Of all the Commonwealth and colonies, Abyssinia had the lowest wages. There were two factors in this; it was only slightly more developed than the southern African colonies of Angola and Mozambique, but possessed a much larger population. Millions of unskilled labor fueled the supply side of the market in favor of large businesses ready to exploit the labor pool. Simply goods, such as pots, pans, chairs and other mass produced items in demand had their own factories set up in Abyssinia. Airstrips in Addis Ababa, Mogadishu and Djibouti serviced the flights and acted as a hub between Ceylon/India, the Boer Republics and the United Provinces. Given the limited range of aircraft at the time, several stop-overs were required along the route between Amsterdam and Colombo or Delhi.
In 1928, VOC Auto began construction on an automobile factory for domestic use of the Abyssinians, as well as VOC operation across Abyssinia. Newly paved roads opened a path for VOC Freight to begin operating trucks to and from railroad depots. The automobile factory produced far more than the VOC required, and the surplus was sold off to the natives. By 1930, parts of Abyssinian were transforming into little chunks of Holland or Brabant, transplanted in this fertile, eastern African land. Though standards of living have skyrockets in the previous fifty years, Abyssinia’s economy remained predominantly agrarian-based. Vitals were now in every village across the country, though electricity was still novel in rural communities. Nonetheless, before achieving statehood, Abyssinia was the most modernized area of East Africa.
By 1935, the Staaten-General in the Hague decided it was time for Abyssinia to hold a Constitution Convention. The organization of the both the Constitution and a series of referendum following it took up the entire year. The first debate between Dutch, Somali and Ethiopian delegates was whether or not to follow the example of Brazil or the Boer Republics. Will Abyssinia be a republic within the Commonwealth or in personal union with the United Provinces as a new monarchy. In June, the first of the referendums were held as first drafts of the Constitution for a monarchy and republic. Though it was modernized by African standards, almost a month passed before all the votes were round up and counted. Some 74% of the voters (of the half of eligible voters who actually voted) were in favor of monarchy. This was a proportionally high in the Dutch and Somali camps, where as more than half of the Ethiopians voted against the Dutch monarch. Even after decades, resentment still existed against the government in the Hague.
The second referendum, held in September of 1935, would decide the fate of the Constitution. Writing the monarchal Constitution was a quick affair. The Constitution of Abyssinia was based of that of Brazil, the United Provinces, Ceylon, New Holland and New Zeeland. As with most elections, the turnout was low compared to other Commonwealth states, with more than half of the Ethiopian population boycotting the election. This, of course, handed the election over to the Dutch and Somali, who passed the Constitution with 81%. The Constitution was slated to take effect on January 1, 1936. King Frederick III arrived in Abyssinia before that date. On his last world tour, the Commonwealth Fleet stopped in Mogadishu, where Frederick III was crowned King Frederick I of Abyssinia in an old colonial governor’s mansion in Mogadishu. He was the only monarch of Abyssinia to not visit the capital of Addis Ababa.
Succession Crisis of 1936
Near the end of his reign and life, Frederick III took one last title under his belt; the King of Abyssinia. For the most part, following the toppling of Emperor Theodore Abyssinia changed little. By 1935, only a small percentage of the population came from the United Provinces, and they bought up land to build coffee plantations. The Abyssinians resented the foreign conquest and occupation, yet reaped the benefits of improved trade and infrastructure.
Frederick’s coronation in the old governor’s mansion in Mogadishu represented the King’s last voyage overseas. It is not known exactly what the King died from, but it is believed to be from complications of tropical diseases. Frederick managed to outlive his brothers, and their sons, the last one dying indirectly from wounds received during the Great War. By 1935, the question of who would succeed Frederick to the throne was up in the air. One faction of the Senaat supported bringing a distant cousin into the core of the House of Oranje. Very few were in favor of simply declaring the House of Oranje extinct.
When the King finally died in early 1936, the United Provinces’ Staaten-General continued the debate, as did the Brazilians and Indians. The Boers cared little who their ‘lord protector’ was since that position was little more than ceremonial. The real power laid in the hands of the elected officials. Ceylon held off debate, waiting to see what the United Provinces would do. The decision of who would be head of the Commonwealth was not in the hands of the largest members, but its smallest.
Days after the King’s death, the New Holland Staaten-General nominated Frederick’s only surviving child, Juliana, to become Queen of New Holland. New Zealand followed suit in March. Before Juliana could accept, she would have to receive the approval of her own Staaten-General. Though Salic succession was not law in the Provinces, it was long standing tradition. Juliana was beloved by the people and had the full support of the House of Electorates, but this was a matter of state not the people, and thus the responsibility of the Senaat.
Over the course of the Spring of 1936, the Staaten-General was eventually won over to Juliana. By then, Ceylon and Brazil offered their crowns to her as well. In August 1936, Juliana took the crown and became the first Queen of the United Provinces. She was not Empress of India until late December, due to opposition of the native princes. In fact, she was almost crowned Princess of Java before Empress of India.
Java gained its own independence within the Commonwealth in January of 1937. While the debate for the monarch raged in national assemblies, the Commonwealth Assembly debated to status of Java. Should it be admitted as a single island, or should it be grouped with the rest of Indonesia. New Holland already broke away from the archipelago, and without Java, the islands were far poorer– that is until the discovery of petroleum around the island.
Java had less oil than Borneo or Sumatra. The Sultan of Brunei struck a deal with the VOC’s new division, VOC Oil. VOC Oil started off as Dutch Royal Shell in the early 1900s. Like with rail and steam, the VOC risked large sums of capital on unproven technology. When they bought Shell in the 1920s, it was still unknown if automobiles would run on petrol or electric. Inventors in Edison Labs in New Amsterdam continued to improve battery technology, making it almost on par with the inefficient engines. VOC’s own automotive division, VOC Auto, made headway in improving the efficiency of early Twentieth Century internal combustion engines.
They bet on gasoline and diesel as the fuel of the future. During the late 1930s, the gross colonial production of the remaining Indonesian islands doubled before 1940. The islands welcomed the reign of Juliana with high hopes for its future. Future division of the islands was put on hold until they developed to the point to be granted the status of a realm within the empire. However, Juliana’s reign did not start on a completely positive note. Enemies of the Dutch Commonwealth began to rebuild after the devastation following the Great War.
Mechanization of the VOC
In 1911, the VOC saw a new potential source of expansion. The aeroplane (or airplane) was a new invention, less than a decade old. It originated in the United States, though American engineers competed with Europeans to develop the first heavier-than-air ship. In the United Provinces, Willem and Georg Fokker established a small shop to produce aircraft in 1907. Fokker Aircraft was a marginal success, barely keeping ahead of their debts as they sought out customers. They entered a partnership with the VOC in 1911, where Fokker Aircraft was purchased and renamed VOC Air, with the brothers left in charge. With the VOC’s capital and the Fokker brother’s engineering, the venture was to meet with success.
The VOC first used and sold aircraft as fast messengers in the years before radio communication (soon adopted into VOC Communication) became reliable. For customers who were willing to pay premium prices, VOC Air offered fast delivery of air mail between the Provinces. After the first year of the Great War, the Dutch governments soon were looking for aircraft of their own. VOC Air was but one of the companies they contracted, and did not even receive the largest contract. The VOC produced hundreds of scouting and recon aircraft for the Commonwealth throughout the war.
After the Great War, consumer interest in air travel came to the Company’s attention. The first VOC airliner was design in 1920, a fourteen seat, four engine, biplane. VOC Air started its first airline route in 1922. It was not in the United Provinces or Brazil, where railroad was still the preferred choice of motion, but between Transvaal and Johannestaaten. Air traffic between the distant towns of the five Boer Republics comprised the bulk of the VOC Air’s income for the 1920s, reaching out to towns too important to be isolated, but too small to justify the expensive of their own railroad line. In 1934, the VOC’s first flying boat began to carry passengers between the United Provinces, Brazil and the Boer Republics, with stop-overs between the U.P. and Brazil in the Azores, and between the Boer Republics and the two others in Cape Verde (though each had to refuel at more than just this one stop). Both islands were home to VOC-owned hotels where passengers were put up for the night.
The VOC was slow to catch on to the automotive industry. Though the railroad could not deliver goods directly to all points, the company believed that it more than made up for it volume and cost efficiency. The automobile during the last decade of the 19th Century and first of the 20th, the automobile was seen as a rich man’s toy. Not until Henry Ford perfected his assembly line approach, which lowered the cost to make automobiles marketable, did the VOC take notice. The VOC purchased a number of ford trucks to augment VOC Rail. These trucks worked for teamsters under VOC contract to deliver goods from the rail depot directly to the store.
It was not until 1924, when the company established VOC Auto and built its first plant in Brazil. VOC Auto was never intended to mass produce motorcars for the public. Instead, it produced thousands of trucks, mostly for company use but also sold to other trucking companies as well as freelance teamsters. There was some debate in the Board about going into the mass consumer market, but by the middle of the 1920s, the market was becoming saturated. The automobile industry, with its reliable and long-lasting vehicles, was a bubble just waiting to burst.
New Enemies
While the Dutch Commonwealth experienced an economic boom along with the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, several other nations faced turmoil. The French economy was heavily taxed by the Great War and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, that coupled with the Balkans Revolution saw the rise of extreme rightist and nationalistic parties, though never to the extent that hit Germany.
The Republic of Spain faced a major downward spiral during the 1920s. Weak central government and the loss of the Great War prompted various nationalities of the Iberians Peninsula to rise up. In 1921, Portugal rose up for the first time if fifty years. The rebellion in Lisbon and Porto was violently crushed by the Spanish Army. Catalonia and Grenada rose up in 1922, followed by Asturias in 1923. All three were crushed, though Catalonia managed to gain temporary independence. The Spanish Army was weaken severely by the uprisings and the aftermath of Versailles.
In 1924, the Basque, original inhabitants of Iberia predating Rome, rose up and declared independence. Again the Spanish Army attempted to crush the uprising. However, the Basque learned from the earlier uprisings, and spent years planning their rebellion. In the Pyrenees, near the French border, the Spanish Army was defeated by the rebel Basques. The Army faced a near complete defeat at the hands of the Basque four weeks later.
By 1925, the Basque Republic was established, and the Spanish parliament entered into negotiations with the rebels. Furthermore, Spanish politicians pushed forward a new constitution, this one allowing autonomy for all nationalities. These concessions were more than a cadre of junior officers within the Spanish Army could stand. In their eyes, the reason the Basque defeated the Spanish Army was not do to will of the soldiers, but ineptitude of the commanding officers. Generals and colonels in Spain were, for the most part, political appointees.
Some officer, lead by Don Carlos de Vega, approached the eldest member of the exiled House of Bourbon, Carlos Bourbon, offering to restore the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. In the eyes of the junior officers, restoration of the monarchy would be the first step to restoring Spain’s greatness. And by installing Carlos as King, the junior officers would gain his favor, not to mention advise him and help remake the Spanish Army into a fighting force to make the Duke of Parma proud.
August 8, 1925, the junior officers simultaneously stormed the parliament building and the Spanish High Command. Members of parliament were all placed under arrest and removed from office. The generals who brought so much disgrace to the country were unceremoniously shot. Many of the parliament were sentenced to hard labor in prison, while the rest fled to France and the Italian Federation. On August 15, after the mass executions and sentencing, the officers roused the bishop in Madrid, ordering him to crown the new king.
That evening, King Carlos V restored the monarchy, and on the advisement of the junior officers, he abolished parliament. Condemnation of the rebirth of absolutism rang out across the continent, and further fueled the fires of revolution in the Balkans, and gave leftist parties in each country a new target to blast. As for the junior officers, they were promoted by the King of Spain and formed a Council of Generals to advise the new absolute monarch. Their first act was to crush the Basque Republic with such force, tens of thousand of refugees fled into France and across the Atlantic.
Turmoil did not strike further until the 1930s. In 1935, unrest grew within the German Empire, much of it fomented by the Steel Helmet League. This quasi-political, paramilitary organization consisted of hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Great War. Many veterans returned to their lives after the war, feeling cheated of victory. By all rights, Germany should have achieved the same level of success as the United States. Quitting so close to victory felt like a betrayal of the people by the Kaiser and the German upper classes.
One soldiers, a disgruntled and unemployed sergeant by the name of Reinhert Heuss, rose through the ranks of the organization. His status as a non-commissioned officer did much to help in his rise to power. He wore it as a badge of honor, proclaiming to the German people that he was more trustworthy than any blue-blooded officer. Following the demobilization of the German Army, Heuss, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers like him, were discharged to face the world alone. With so much of the Germany industry geared for war in the process of winding down, these soldiers joined the masses of unemployed.
Heuss was one of the many, with no home or job, depending on the charity of others for a living. As a former soldier, one who fought to preserve the Fatherland, he thought he was entitled to more than destitution. The Steel Helmets formed after the war ended, as such a charity. Made up of better-off soldiers, the Steel Helmets were determined to assist their former comrades. The fact that the State seemed to care little of those who fought in its name, sometimes made the Steel Helmets appear to be the only ones who cared.
Their status as a helping hand did not last. Being made of former soldiers, the Steel Helmet League was a fiercely nationalistic. Heuss might not have had much in the way of trade skills, but he was a master orator. He used this nationalism as well as the feelings of betrayal to catapult himself to the forefront of the organization. He could not come out and accuse the Kaiser of treason, for the Kaiser could easily have him arrested. Instead, he focused his fellow Helmets’ anger on a more politically acceptable target; the Slavs.
Heuss was not the only one who was convinced the Central Powers would have won had the Reds not risen. From 1927 onward, it was the Slavs who were the traitors. They rose up under a communist banner and stabbed the German-speaking world in the back. Never mind that the Slavs of the former Habsburg Empire were not there by choice. Fear of communism did much to drive Germans into the arms of the Steel Helmets. Heuss made Slav and Communist interchangeable. As far as he was concerned, they were one in the same.
Through the early 1930s, more and more members elected to the Reichstag were also members of the Steel Helmets. A great portion of the German Army joined the Helmets, for after all, what harm could a nationalistic organization do to its own country? What it could do was shown on February 13, 1935, when after a year of planning, Heuss made his move. It all began as a general strike in the larger cities of Germany. The Kaiser’s government sent out soldiers to attempt to break these strikes. To the Kaiser’s dismay, more than half of the army sent out turned their weapons in favor of the Steel Helmets.
In Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, Munich and Vienna, Steel Helmets stormed government buildings. The Kingdom of Bavaria was the first of the German states to succumb to the Steel Helmets. The King attempted to flee north at first, only to find his path blocked. South was a better option, even if it meant fleeing to Italy. He was not the first monarch to find himself deposed by the Steel Helmet Revolution.
By April 20, the Steel Helmets were in charge of most of the German states, with a mob of over a million marching on Berlin. As they were mostly former or current soldiers, the mob marched with great order. They faced off against soldiers loyal to the Kaiser at Dresden on April 23. Though lighter armed than the German Army, the Helmets nonetheless outnumbered them by ten-to-one. Through great losses the Helmets pressed on their march, only to be stopped against outside of Berlin. On April 30, the Kaiser was advised to evacuated.
Though much of the Army had joined the Helmets, the High Seas Fleet was staunchly loyal to the Kaiser. On May 3, the Kaiser boarded the battleship Baden, where he and many officers loyal to him, left for exile. Along with the Kaiser, almost the entire High Seas Fleet, as well as most of the Luftwaffe, and some of the Empire’s most brilliant generals, departed their homeland and steamed for the River Platte Colony.
Heuss wasted no time in declaring a German Republic, and calling for an immediately constitutional convention. Naturally, this convention will controlled and ran by the Steel Helmets. It was to nobody’s surprise that Heuss was elected the first President of the German Republic. Nor was it a surprise when the new constitution abolished all privileges and nobility. What was a surprise, though one not noticed at the time, was a clause within the constitution that allowed the President to rule by decree in the event of emergency. With parts of Germany still in chaos, emergencies were not hard to find.
The international reaction to this coup was mixed. The French Republic rejoiced in seeing their old enemy the Kaiser removed from power. They were the first in Europe to recognize the new republic. Most of the European monarchies refused to recognize Heuss’s government, with the notable exception of Spain. Reaction across the Atlantic were far sharper. The United States government refused to recognize the new state, despite the fact it was a republic and that the U.S. often supported fledgling republics. President Victor Abrams declared his nation would stand firmly behind their ally, the Kaiser.
The Crusades
Heuss spent the next three years placing Germany back into order. This is a rather clinically sterile way of saying he used the time to eliminate all opposition to his role. The purges of 1937 proved to be nearly as bloody as the purges in the Balkan Union. The Army suffered as any and all of the Imperialists were systematically removed from power. Heuss’s quick and brutal actions prevented a full-scale civil war between Imperialists and Nationalists by several years. Once threats were removed and the Steel Helmets consolidated their power, Heuss turned southeast towards his greatest enemy.
On November 30, 1940, the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was introduced to modern warfare. In the morning of November 30, thousands of aircraft crossed the border and bombarded every major city within a thousand kilometers of the northern border. Budapest suffered severe firestorms on the nights of December 2 and 3, reducing five square kilometers of the city to ash and rubble.
By December 1, over two hundred thousand Nationalist German soldiers crossed the northern frontier. Three main thrusts were in the works; one to Budapest, one to Zagreb and a third to Bratislava. Zagreb was the first to fall, on December 8, when the 1st Panzer Group (12th Army) rolled into the city with minimal opposition. Bratislava was declared an open city and occupied on December 10. Budapest was a tougher nut for the Germans to crack. Two divisions of the Red Army, under the command of Vladka Macek, denied the city to 5th Panzer Division and the 2nd Steel Helmet Division Das Reich for two weeks. During this period, the city suffered continuing aerial bombardment, despite already having its heart burned out days before.
The Battle of Budapest was a vicious fight, with Nationalist German forces leveling entire city blocks to dislodge the Red Army. The city in ruins finally fell on December 23. During this same period, three German divisions had the capital of Belgrade surrounded and under siege. The Siege of Belgrade lasted between December 13, 1940 to January 7, 1941, when the city surrendered. Most of the higher echelons of the I.B.W. melted away into the population. A number of them were captured, including Ivan Mestrovic, who died in the Kotor concentration camp in 1942. Once in Nationalist German hands, the city of Belgrade was renamed Prinzeugenestadt, and the Steel Helmets went to work preparing the general vicinity for future German colonization. During 1941-1942, over a hundred thousand people were deported from the city to the camps.
The Closest the Red Army came to stopping the Nationalist Germans came on January 28, during the Battle of Pristina. Two German armored divisions squared off against three armored divisions of the Red Army, in what came to be known as the largest tank battle of Operation Krusader. The Red Army, lead by General Nikos Zachariadis, blunted several drives by the Germans during the course of the morning. One counterattack even managed to push back a panzer brigade several kilometers.
In the end, what decided the battle was not the quality of armor or armor tactics, but control of the air. The paltry Nationalist Luftwaffe dominated the skies over the Balkan Union. Stuka divebombers, obsolete as they were, still we more than capable of knocking out Balkan tanks. Most Balkan tanks were taken out this way. Once the Germans were clearly in control of the battlefield, Zachariadis ordered a general retreat, after which, what tanks that could not be hidden were scuttled. The battle offered the last great resistance of the Red Army, and the Nationalist German forces, after the battle, continued into Greece, taking Athens.
The last holdout of active resistance in the Balkan Union was at Sofia. The city fell to the enemy on February 27, 1941. With it, the Balkan Union was under the control of Nationalist Germany. On March 1, the Balkan government officially surrendered to the Reich, thus ending the existence of the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics. Those officials attending the surrender were put under arrest and either shipped off to prison camps or shot. The Balkan Union was dismantled in short order.
Croatia, Bosnia and much of Serbia was organized into a puppet state, along with Greece. The former was slated to be colonized by Germans after the war ended, and after the area had been ethnically cleansed. “Non-Slavs”, at least by National Socialist reckoning, were organized into independent vassals. The states of Hungary, Bulgaria, Dacia and Crimea were created, and locals of a more conservative persuasion were placed in power. The states were nominally independent, and in control of internal affairs. However, these junior partners answered directly to the Nationalists.
The Fascists in command of the vassals were ultra-nationalistic in attitude, many were exiled from their homelands after the Balkan Revolution. When restored to their nations, and placed in power, they began to purge their nations of communists. The blood letting the commenced was on the same scale as post-Revolution purges. All non-nationalities within the nations were expelled, and in some cases, sent into concentration camps. The fact that, on a genetic scale, that all the Balkans had Slavic blood in them to some extent did not factor into the Nationalist’s Final Solution to the Slavic Problem.
The Camps
A large portion of Steel Helmet doctrine revolves around an anti-Slavic attitude. The Great War effectively came to an end with the Balkan Revolution, with no clear cut winner. This was one of the tools the Steel Helmet used to come to power; they claimed the Slavs betrayed them, cost them victory. At first, the solution to the Slavic Problem was to enslave many and expel the rest. Centuries before, they migrated into Europe from the East, and to the east they would be sent again. However, The East, was under Swedish control, and they had no desire to accept millions of refugees. The possibility to expel the Slavs all the way east of the Urals was discussed, but found infeasible for the immediate future. The refugee problem eventually lead to some Swedish intervention in the Balkans.
The Nationalists demanded results, and demanded them immediately. The Slavs would be removed from the land, but where would they be stored? The first concentration camp was opened north of Srebrenica, which was home to fifty thousand Slavs and other undesirables. The idea of mass extermination was not at first visited. Instead, the Slavs would be reduced to slavery, put to some use for the Germans they betrayed. To the Nationalist, that was all the “under-men” were good for. Labor camps were constructed within the boundaries of Germany, near mines and factories, where the Slavs would be used for menial labor.
A second camp was opened in Macedonia, nominally under Bulgarian control. However, the Nationalist Germans seized control of the monestrous Macedonian Tank Works, and put Slavs to use building new tanks for the Nationalists. All the industrial giants of Germany were quick to jump at the prospect of free labor. Hundreds of thousands of Slavs in labor camps across the Balkans and Germany were worked to death building weapons for the Nationalist and his henchmen.
Labor camps were just the beginning. In early 1942, a new camp was constructed five kilometers south of Srebrenica. This camp had little in the way of forced labor. The healthy and able bodied prisoners were separated from the rest. The laborers were loaned out to companies as free labor. The rest went into gas chambers. Millions of Slavs were killed in this fashion, their corpses sent into the ovens, along with other enemies of the Reich. The first people to go to the death camps were Communist Party officials, including the Revolutionary, Ivan Mestrovic. After the party leaders, came functionaries. After them, any village or town that displayed the least bit of resistance was depopulated and deported to the camps.
Operation Arctic Thunder
Heuss faced serious threats to the west, diverting him from further crusading actions against the Slavs. Though France supported the new Republic, they were not so much in favor of the invasion of the UBSR. Italy was quite the opposite, strongly supporting the elimination of the Red Menace across the Adriatic. Despite these attitudes, neither was willing to get involved in internal German affairs on a military level. This did not hold true for the United Provinces. The Dutch Commonwealth declared itself neutral in the war, though not neutral towards the Kaiser.
Heuss saw threats everywhere, and in the case of the Dutch, it was far from paranoia. The United States already made its position clear; it would overtly act to restore the Kaiser. America’s former enemies, the British, joining in this declaration. Despite their differences, the British considered the Kaiser a better deal than the Steel Helmets. With the High Seas Fleet in South America, Heuss had no chance at invading Britain. The United Provinces were another story, one that could potentially end as a springboard for the Kaiser to return to Germany.
On April 1, 1942, National Luftwaffe units began to hammer away at the cities of the United Provinces. On April 2, armored units diverted from the Balkans crossed the border. The invasion took both France and Britain by surprise, raising alarm within these countries. Paris began to wonder if it would be next. Their recognition of the German Republic saved them from invasion. The Dutch people were not so fortunate.
Following the invasion, an emergency session of the Commonwealth Assembly was called, though would be delayed by a day due to the time it would take Brazilian delegates to fly via airship to Amsterdam. Queen Juliana immediately ordered the fleet in the North Sea to move on Norway, to first stop any further invasion, and secondly to destroy the paratroopers occupying Oslo. Commonwealth ships in the North Sea came under immediate fire by U-boats, with the loss of one cruiser (traveling alone) and several other ships were damage.
Before the Commonwealth could officially declare war, some fifteen German divisions crossed the frontier. First to fall was the town of Oldenzaal, closest to the German border. The city put up no resistance and panzers simply rolled through the town continuing onward into Drenthe. The Lord of Drenthe ordered the Provincial militia to take to the field immediately. Only minutes after the first German soldier crossed the frontier, hundreds of airplanes hit serval Dutch cities, from Rotterdam to Luxembourg.
The worst hit city was that of Liege. The attack was such a surprise, that bombs were falling before either the Regent or Bishop of Liege knew the Germans crossed the border. However, the Regent did deploy some air defenses after hearing about the attacks across Norway. The meager air-defense battalion did little against German bombers. After the wave flew over, much of the city was burning, and the ancient cathedral, the same place where coronations of Kings (and Queen) took place.
By April 5, German forces entered Maastricht, sweeping aside the Provincial garrison, and by nightfall the same day, a second prong of the invasion took the ruins of Liege with little difficulty. When attempting to advance on Amsterdam on the 6th, the Hollanders breached several levies and dikes, flooding the fields and seriously impeding German advances. This did not stop a northern flanking maneuver from Drenthe, taking Harlingen and nearly cutting Amsterdam off from the North Sea.
On April 7, four days after the invasion of the low countries began, Germans surrounded Amsterdam with one thrust from the north, and another two divisions quickly bypassing the flooded fields. The Hague fell on the night of April 7, completely encircling Amsterdam, which surrendered the next day. Within five days, the northern Province fell into the control of Fuhrer Germany. As soon as the Hague fell and Amsterdam surrendered, the Germans pursued escaping Dutch officials to Middelburg in Zeeland.
It was here that the House of Oranje boarded the battleship DCS Prinz van Oranje, bound to Recife. It was a repeat of the Napoleonic War, where the Dutch royal family again were forced into exile. German generals were under orders to capture the Dutch queen and head of the Commonwealth, and this pursuit delayed actions in the southern Provinces. At 0100, on April 8, 1940, the Prinz van Oranje left port, escorted by three cruisers and eight destroyers and the (light) aircraft carrier Rotterdam.
When the Kaiser fled Germany in 1935, most of the High Seas Fleet went with him, leaving Nationalist Germany to rebuild its navy. Heuss had no carriers, one battleship and three battlecruisers, along with ten cruisers, and dozens of submarines. Only two U-Boats were in place to intercept the royal entourage, both sunk quickly by leading destroyers. The greatest threat to Juliana’s safety came from the air.
JC-13s from the Rotterdam fought off many of the German aircraft, but the light carrier could only field twenty fighters. The Luftwaffe came after them with over a hundred aircraft, though many were level bombers. And those missed the target. Dive-bombers faired worse, for they were viewed as the greatest threats. Dutch fighters downed many of them, but not without the loss of a cruiser, the DCSMaas.
A few of the German bombers flew low, equipped with torpedoes. Two torpedoes sunk a destroyer, and three more were dead on for the Prinz van Oranje. One torpedo hit the ship at the bow, but proved to be a dud. A second missed, but the third proved to be quite live. The third torpedo was intercepted by the destroyer Trident, which passed in front of the torpedo, taking the hit for the Queen. The ship was struck amidship, split in half and sank quickly. Only seven survivors made it to British shore.
While the royal family made its escape, fighting continued in the southern Provinces. Luxembourg was overwhelmed on April 5. Namur fell on April 7, and those German divisions linked with the force out of Luxembourg, and continued into France along with several divisions that entered the Duchy of Luxembourg after the city fell. All of the United Provinces were under German control by April 10, with the exception of Brussels.
Commonwealth and German forces fought fiercely around the city. No matter the valor of the Commonwealth soldiers, the Germans were slowly pushing them back into the besieged city. Germans spared little in the way of artillery and aircraft to neutralize Brussels; the bulk of their forces storming through France. The people of Brussels suffered greatly during the siege and latter during occupation. During the siege, every able-bodied Netherlander in the city pitched in to help in the defense, from building breastworks to cooking for the soldiers. No matter its defiance, Brussels fell seventeen days after the invasion started, on April 22.
Provinces under Nationalist control suffered the most severe crackdown on liberty since the nation’s founding, over three centuries previous. Newspapers were shutdown, radio stations placed under the control of the German Army. Military governors were placed in power over each Province. Most of the Provincial rulers went into exile with the rest of the Staaten-General and the Queen. Only the Countess of Artois missed the boat. Countess Jeanette had the means to escape, but refused to leave while her subject suffered under the Nationalist occupation. For her troubles, the Germans placed the Countess under house arrest, and General von Beck attempted to rule the County of Artois in her name. The Artoisers did not buy the farce.
Occupational authorities heavily rationed goods that the Dutch people long since took for granted. Sugar and coffee were confiscated for use by the Germans, leaving little to none for Netherlanders. At first there was protest, for it was a long standing Dutch tradition to speak out at perceived injustices. For their troubles, the occupying authorities threw them into the one of many detention centers erected around the Provinces.
At first, the resistance did everything it possibly could to make the occupation force’s stay in the United Provinces as difficult as possible. Some actions were of downright defiance to the Germans, such as on the night of February 5, 1943, some brazen Netherlanders managed to infiltrate a German airbase near Lier, steal sugar from the pilot’s mess, dump it into the fuel tanks of the pilot’s planes, and just to make absolutely certain the Germans knew who was responsible, the perpetrators rose the orange-white-and-blue banner of the United Provinces over the airfield. Needless to say, those Germans responsible for security that night were severely punished.
Any and all attempts at normalcy the Dutch people attempted to create failed. Netherlanders continued to tend the fields and work the factories. The United Provinces faced a partial economic collapse during the Occupation Years. Many foreign speculators who made fortunes on the Amsterdam Stock Market, sold off their shares and commodities the day Germany launched its attack. When they fled the United Provinces, they took with them the largest single-day transfer of wealth in Dutch history. Companies were ruined and the banks of Amsterdam faced a run.
The Bank of Amsterdam, a bank that weathered centuries of economic ups and downs, would sooner face a world-wide depression than what the Germans did to that institution. To fund the German war machine, Heuss ordered the banks plundered, billions of guilders in gold and silver were stripped from the financial capital of the world and shipped east across the Wesser. The Nationalist Government did not stop with the banks, cultural artifacts were pillaged, including some of the greatest works of Van Gogh.
For a nation that long since depended upon trade for its survival, German occupation of the ports and harbors found many traders and merchants instantly out of work. Larger traders, with offices in other Commonwealth states, would survive the occupation, but the small, individual trader, a long standing Dutch tradition, was wiped out before New Year’s of 1943. Many factories were taken under the control of occupational authorities, and put to use for the German war effort. Many loyal Netherlanders quit rather than build bullets and bombs for the enemy.
Despite the nationalistic spirit of the Dutch people, so strong it drove many to go hungry rather than assist conquerors, the Netherlands faced the same bane as all occupied nations; collaboration. When not harassing the Germans, the Resistance targeted any and all that overtly aided the Germans. Workers in factories were spared the retaliation, for there were still families than needed feeding, but those who worked with and for the Gestapo were often found in the morning, quite dead.
Though many individuals would rise up against the occupiers, the Resistance did its best to keep a low profile. It specialized in both sabotaging the enemy, and aiding fellow Netherlanders left unemployed and destitute by the occupation. It was not until the middle of 1944, that the Dutch Resistance rose up against the occupiers.
Resistance
Even before the mass murder of the Slavs, Balkans resisted German occupation and the puppet vassals. The International Brotherhood of Workers melted away into the crowd after the Balkan Union fell. Most of these were part of the original Revolutionary cells back in 1916. New cells were formed. However, these cells were not all communistic in nature. Many cells drifted towards the inherit nationalism that plagues the Balkans. These cells attacked their neighbors just as readily as they attacked the occupiers.
Chief among the resistance leaders was Joseph Tito. Born in Kunrovec, Croatia in 1892, Tito participated in the Balkan Uprisings. He was a young officer in the Croatian Socialist Army, serving under Trumbic during the capture of Zagreb. He spent the immediate years after the formation of the Balkan Union as a party official in the Croatian Soviet. During the Trumbic Years, he was elevated to the Supreme Soviet of the Union, as were many of Trumbic’s fellow Croatians. He was part of Croatia’s representation during every Party Congress between 1936-1940. When Nationalist Germany invaded the Balkan Union, Tito melted away into the Croatian countryside, along with units of the broken Red Army.
Tito’s partisans began their attacks against the occupiers in mid 1941. Their raids were minor at first; small unit patrols vanishing, road side bombs knocking out trucks, even one stunt were a partisan smuggled a fine, itchy powder into a laundry frequented by the Germans. Tito’s campaign picked up in pace when his partisans assassinated Nationalist strongman Reinhard Heydrick in Split, on August 4, 1943. In retaliation, the Steel Helmets deported more than sixty percent of the city’s population to camps scattered across the Balkans.
His reign of terror did succeed in dragging more soldiers into the Balkans to pacify the region, soldiers that could be headed for the Eastern Front. Partisans were some of the first outside of the Steel Helmets to learn of the existence of the camps. Once it became clear that his countrymen were being butchered by the thousands, Tito ordered general attacks against any and all Steel Helmet personnel. Any Helmet man captured would be swiftly executed. He shifted his attacks away from the German Army and on to servants of the Nationalist.
The greatest blow against the Slavic Genocide came on May 18, 1944, when Tito personally lead a raid against a train stuffed full of Croats and Bosniaks destined for Sarejavo. More than five thousand people were crammed into a couple dozen cattle cars. Many died during the escape, but the surviving adults were recruited into Tito’s army. Again, the Helmets retaliated for this attack. They massacred four thousand men, women and children outside of Sarejavo, dumping their corpses into a pit and setting it ablaze.
Aside from Marshall Tito, another of the old guard lead resistance, Zoltan Tildy. Instead of fighting Nationalist Germany directly, he remained in his homeland of Hungary, and did battle with the vassal government installed by the Nationalist. Tildy’s campaign did not have the magnitude of bloodshed that Tito knew, but he did prove successful in throwing a monkey wrench into the Hungarians works. His raid on the Hungarian Air Force’s Szolnok, and destruction of numerous fighters warranted this comment from an analysis in the RAF; “Monkey wrench nothing, Tildy threw the whole monkey into the work.”
Reprisals within the Hungarian state were nowhere near as brutal as within territories directly occupied by Nationalist Germany. In truth, the Hungarian Secret Police were amateurs when compared to the Helmet’s security apparatus. Many were quietly sympathetic with the resistance. There were no longer any overt communists within Hungary’s government. Like in the occupied territories, the vassals also purged themselves of I.B.W. members, handing them over to Nationalist Germany, as per the one-sided treaties the Nationalist forced upon his vassals.
War against Japan
A month after the Germans launched their assault against the United Provinces, the resource-starved Japanese moved against Indonesia. In order to secure a supply line to the oil rich islands, they first landed soldiers on Formosa and Hainan. With millions of soldiers already based in .China, the Japanese had a nearly inexhaustible invasion force after they won control of the Strait of Taiwan. The bulk of the Commonwealth Pacific fleet was based around Java, and the few ships in Formosa were sunk or disabled while still in port.
Commonwealth forces only numbered some five divisions on the island, far more than the initial invasion. However, with control of the seas and air, the Japanese continued to funnel reinforcements and supplies. Formosa held out far longer than the United Provinces, Taipei, the final holdout, surrendering on September 8. Hainan faired worse, surrendering after three weeks of heavy fighting. On both islands, the Japanese attempted to present themselves as liberators.
But liberators to what? Japan said ‘Asia for the Asians’, but the Chinese on both islands long since considered themselves Dutch. They spoke the Dutch language, adopted Dutch personal names, and knew nothing but Dutch liberty for centuries. For being liberators, the Japanese were quick to suppress any dissent on the island. When the Formosans attempted to protest Japanese policy on food rationing, the crowds were met not with reassurances but the rattle of machine guns.
The Japanese Navy and Army were very divided, so much so that it was a wonder they advanced as far and as fast as they did. With the Army gaining much glory, the Navy set out to best them. The Japanese Navy sought out and found the Commonwealth fleet in the Java Sea. In what would be the first case of naval warfare without ships actually seeing each other, Japanese carriers launched an attack against the Commonwealth.
By September of 1942, the Dutch Commonwealth was facing defeat in the East Indies. The Japanese were already in control of the ports on Sumatra and Borneo, and sought to add Java to their Empire, along with the oil fields of the East Indies. The Japanese had spent the previous month pounding away at airfields on Java, and managed to destroy the dry dock facilities in Jakarta. The Commonwealth Navy in that part of the world was not as high as in the Atlantic, where the bulk of the Commonwealth Navy was massed in Brazil, participating in the Battle of the Atlantic. Limited Commonwealth Naval forces were divided between Ceylon and Jakarta, the forces on Formosa being destroyed in 1942.
The Commonwealth fleet, under the command of Admiral Karl Doorman, with his flag on the DCS William IV. Accompanying him, the battlecruiser Tanhausen, the carrier Delft, along with cruisersJava, Delphi, and Flores and five destroyers. Commonwealth carrier doctrine stress air cover over the fleet to allow the big guns to enter range of the enemy. As such, the Delft carried fighters and scout planes, and had no ability to project its power beyond the horizon. This tactic proved effective against Nationalist Germany, but only because their navy was shriveled since the bulk of the German Imperial Navy supports the Kaiser.
The Japanese Navy, on the other hand, utilized air power in ways that European and American navies had not considered. The Japanese used carrier-based air craft in attacks on Formosa and British Luzon. The British Far East fleet was destroyed in Manilla Bay by the Japanese Navy. The Japanese fleet, under the command of Admiral Takeo Takagi, from his flagship the Hiryu. Hiryu was accompanied by the carrier Soryu, along with battleship Yamashiro, cruisers Tone and Takeo along with five destroyers. Behind this fleet was the invasion force of one carrier, four battleships, seven cruisers and a mess of destroyers, along with twelve thousand soldiers.
The Commonwealth fleet maneuvered along the north shore of Java, never moving one hundred kilometers away from the shore, and its additional air cover. The Japanese fleet moved down the Makassar Strait, into attack range on September 16, 1942. At 0500, both Japanese carriers launched a risky night-time attack against the Commonwealth fleet. The fighters and bombers would have returned long after sunrise. Accompanying the attack, two hundred Japanese medium bombers took off from bases on Borneo, and struck diversionary attacks at airbases surrounding Jakarta, cratering the runways. Additional air strikes severely damaged the port, making it virtually impossible, or at the very least impractical for the fleet to make call. It is not known precisely, but is believed that Doorman considered this the main attack of the day, and he ordered half of his fighters to intercept the Betty bombers.
At 0820, the first wave of 10 Japanese torpedo bombers struck at the Commonwealth fleet. Three were downed by anti-aircraft fire, and four more by the remaining air cover. However, the torpedo bombers drew the too few fighters down low, while Japanese dive bombers struck at the fleet. At 0826, the first of the Vals struck the Delft. Minutes later, bombs struck the DCS Tanhausen, knocking out its forward turret. A second attack from above hit the Delft at 0831. This strike knocked out the carrier’s elevators and destroyed the bridge superstructure. A second wave of torpedo bombers homed in on the carrier at 0837, destroying its rudder and rupturing its bow. The end of the Delft did not occur until 0903, after the first Japanese attack had departed, when fires raging through the carrier engulfed an armory, setting off numerous one hundred millimeter anti-aircraft artillery. At 0910, the surviving senior officer ordered abandon ship. A destroyer running along side the carrier during the battle also sunk, as result of taking two torpedoes intended for the Delft.
Doorman now had no choice but to retreat closer to Java, and hope that it had enough fighters to provide air cover. Two destroyers broke from his fleet to rescue survivors of the doomed carrier, while the rest of the fleet steamed towards the southwest. The few fighters that Java managed to get airborne, were outclassed by the Zeros when the second attack arrived at 1411. While the Commonwealth fighters were picked off by the zeros, Kate torpedo bomber homed in on the King William IV, while Vals attacked the battlecruiser. The damaged Tanhausen was hit by four more bombs, the last of which penetrated the aft deck and into the magazine. With one tremendous explosion, the Tanhausen broke two-thirds of the way to its stern at 1418. The rest of the ship sank within ten minutes, with most of the crew on board.
At 1422, torpedoes ripped open the starboard hull of the King William IV, causing the battleship to list severely. Java exploded in a giant fire ball at 1426, and Delphi was crippled by repeated attacks. The Japanese ended their attack at 1431, with two additional destroyers on fire, and the King William IV further damaged by addition bombs. Admiral Doorman was killed during the last bombing run, when the bridge was strafe, and then toppled by a bomb impact below it. The King William IV capsized at 1541. By night fall, when it was clear no further attack was on its way, Captain Hans Vermen of the DCS Flores took command of the fleet, and ordered the survivors of the disastrous battle to be retrieved by night fall. Following sunset, the remainder of the fleet limped eastwards towards Ceylon, since Jakarta’s port facilities were no longer able to take on the ships.
The Battle of the Java Sea was the first naval battle in history were the fleets never actually saw each other. The battle also shattered Commonwealth carrier doctrine, and propelled the Commonwealth to design and produce its own carrier-based bombers and attackers. The battle also allowed the Japanese to land on Java, and occupy Jakarta. Like the other major islands of the archipelago, the Japanese were easily able to control the cities and oil fields, but failed to pacify the rest of the island, though not from lack of effort. The Commonwealth Navy was out of the East Indies for the better part of a year, until the first of the Ernst van Bohr class carriers were launched. Commonwealth ground forces did not return to the islands until 1944.
As bad as life under enemy occupation was for Netherlanders, it was far worse for Formosans and Javans. The Principality of Java was never fully subjugated by the Japanese. Though they occupied ports, airfields and coastal area, but never the interior. They were only interested in controlling the island and seas around it, for the even larger oil fields of Sumatra and especially Borneo. Though Japan would continue to proclaim Asia for the Asians, they simply could not spare the resources to bring Java into full compliance, at least not while fighting multiple enemies on multiple fronts.
Formosa, however, was another story. As was stated earlier, when the Formosans attempted to protest the Japanese the same way they would the Commonwealth, the Japanese replied with the rat-tat of machine guns. That was just the start. To the Dutch, race meant little, but to the Japanese it meant everything. Those ‘racially’ European, were interned in camps across the island. However, after centuries, and mostly Dutch male colonization, there was little that could be called ‘white’. What the Japanese did not understand was that ‘race is skin-deep, but nations go to the heart’. The racially Asian, i.e. those whose ancestors came from southern China, considered themselves Formosans, and ‘as Dutch as the next man’.
While the Europeans were interned, the Japanese, claiming to liberate the Chinese, repressed them with the same vigor as they did on mainland Asia. Japanese nationalism in turn sparked Dutch nationalism for all the islanders. The love of nation was so strong, that one monk gave up obtaining Nirvana this lifetime for the sake of his country. Like most Buddhist monks, Singhanda Mantama attempted to resist Japanese occupation through non-violent means, including civil disobedience. The Japanese would crush any and all disobedience, and further retaliate by destroying several Theravada temples, along with Catholic and Protestant churches.
Born in India, Mantama, like most Indians, was at first suspicious of the Dutch. Unlike Ceylon, Java and Formosa, who were made Dutch over the course of centuries of colonization and assimilation, India was conquered in a relatively short time. Aside from southern India, which was inherited from Portugal following United Provinces’ independence, the rest of the subcontinent was brought under Dutch rule by military force between 1783 to the 1870s. Some Indian states allied themselves with the Dutch, and thus kept their own languages and cultures (though Commonwealth culture would slowly filter in). The states brought into compliance by force, in turn had the Dutch language, law and customs forced upon them. This odd arrangement makes India the most cosmopolitan of Commonwealth states, and the most prone to instability.
Mantama grew up in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. Even as recent as the 1930s, when Mantama left India for Formosa, India was still backwards compared to the rest of the Commonwealth. Because of its diversity, India was always the slowest Dutch nation to adapt. Industrialization, which occurred in the United Provinces, Brazil and Formosa during the Nineteenth Century, is still occurring in India of the Twenty-first Century. However, Mantama did not leave in search of a better life, but in search of Enlightenment.
His quest for Enlightenment came to an end when Japanese bombs began to rain near his monastery in 1940. His, along with the Formosans’ world, was turned upside down when the Japanese overran the island, and forced the Commonwealth surrender. Though the politicians surrendered, many of the Commonwealth soldiers went to ground and fled to the hills, to continue to fight against the occupiers. However, unlike the Germans, the Japanese were not about to tolerate any dissent.
When one of Mantama’s fellow monks went to the Japanese authorities in protest over the seizure of rice from farmers without compensation, the Japanese guards ran him through with bayonets. Monks that tried to block traffic with their bodies were simply ran over. Another, refusing to bow to ‘savages’ was beaten to death by a Japanese patrol. It was these events that forced other monks to realize they would have to fight back with force.
Knowing he could not stop the violence, Mantama endeavored to control and direct the violence. His strategies in luring Japanese patrols into traps and minimizing Dutch deaths, improved his own standing within the resistance. By 1943, Mantama was effectively the head of the Dutch Resistance on Formosa. With each ambush, the Japanese were forced to increase size of patrols, until entire platoons were patrolling the streets of Taipei and New Antwerp.
Killing of Japanese soldiers did not go without reprisal. The Japanese resorted to random executions, adding that to policies of forced labor, reeducation, so-called comfort girls and genocide. Each murder in the sake of retaliation weighed heavily on Mantama. Perhaps it was his consciousness, but Mantama never made a decision lightly. He would prefer to have no killings at all. His reluctance brought much criticism against him by the more radical resistance cells. They wondered why should they not strike at the enemy. Nobody asked the Japanese to come to Formosa, they just forced their way in, and it was the resistance’s job to drive them out.
It was not until the dawn of 1945, when a Commonwealth invasion loomed over the horizon did Mantama unleash the resistance upon the Japanese. As soon as bombs fell and smoke cleared, the resistance slipped into damaged barracks to slit the throats of any surviving Japanese. Nor was it until Commonwealth soldiers set foot on Formosa did the resistance wheel out artillery and a few tanks hidden away in the hills. If not for Mantama’s temperance, various resistance cells might have piddled away resources until they had nothing to face the occupiers on the day of liberation.
Liberation
In October of 1944, War Plan Tulip unfolded as the Commonwealth landed an invasion force in Zeeland, north of Middelburg. Middelburg was not the first choice of cities to be liberated, but Queen Juliana insisted the invasion plans be changed. It was the port she left her homeland years before, and she wished it to be the first city to be free, and the port of her re-entry.
Germany did not anticipate an invasion of northern Europe so early. By the middle of November, Zeeland was all but liberated, and Commonwealth forces were now on both sides of the mouth of the Rhine. Any hope of keeping the Dutch, or any other ally, on the far side of the river. Bridges across the Rhine soon became the heaviest fortified positions in all of Europe.
Nationalist Germany managed to hold this line until April of 1945, when the Commonwealth provided a breakout along the Rhine. The Hague was cleared of occupational forces on May 7, 1945, with Delft liberated one day later. Whilst be forced from Amsterdam, the Germans attempted to breach levies and dikes all along the Holland coast. Only two breaches occurred, and those were patched within a week. The Queen condemned the actions of the Nationalist German government, but as she and the world would soon learn, these were far from the most heinous crimes of the Nationalist regime,
The liberation of the Balkans began in August of 1944, with the Swedish invasion of Crimea. Sweden brought itself into the war for the sake of humanitarian reasons, for it was the Red Cross that informed the King of the genocide, as well as to remove the Nationalist Germans from the Balkans. Though Sweden had no love for the Kaiser, they preferred him vastly over the rapidly destabilizing Heuss. Leading the drive into Crimea were Sweden’s legendary armored cavalry, the Cossacks. The Crimean vassal lasted only twenty-three days against the Swedish invasion, before capitulating. On the twenty-first day, when victory was all but assured, the Crimean people rose up in a spontaneous rebellion, ousting the hated puppet dictator. The leader of this Fascists state, Revik Gzorny, was lynched in the courtyard of the People’s Court in Sevastopol. Though Crimea fell easily, the Nationalist German Army constructed elaborate fortification across Dacia.
Bulgaria was the next vassal to fall. On January 17, 1945, the government in Sofia fell, and was replaced by the Bulgarian Socialist Party. On January 20, the Bulgarian Balkan Socialist Republic joined the Swedes in their drive through the Balkans. Greek partisans joined the Bulgarians in liberated Constantinople from the Nationalist’s grasp. Closing the Bosporus effectively cut off any pockets of German resistance along the Black Sea.
By April of 1945, the Red Army came out of hiding in force. Before, they were but partisans, bloodying the Nationalist wherever possible. With Swedish forces grinding through the Balkans, the Red Army retrieved all the heavy equipment if had cached away, including more than two hundred surviving tanks. The Red Army struck south through Greece, and met German armor in what could only be called a reverse battle of Thermopylae. It was the Greeks who charged into the now widened pass, breaking the garrison and driving on Athens. No front line soldiers of the Reich were based within Greece since the fall of the Balkan Union. This fact was what allowed the reborn Red Army to achieve victory.
By June of 1945, the Swedish Army crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania, at the time occupied by Hungary. With the Swedish Army rolling over the Nationalist’s Hungarian vassals, the Hungarian people seized the moment and rose up against the installed government. Tildy lead his partisans in the most overt action of his carrier as a guerilla; a full scale assault on Budapest. His attack was premature, and broken by the Germans garrisoned in the city.
Though the attack on the capital failed, the general uprising succeeded in taking control of the countryside, while the Hungarian nationalists remained in command of the major cities. Partisans hit each convoy that ventured between cities, massacring the soldiers and looting their supplies. City by city fell to Swedish sieges, unable to resupply do to partisan activity. Tildy linked up with the 55th Kiev Infantry and 5th Cossack Armored Cavalry south of Budapest, and attempted to take the city again in late September. Though the Hungarians fought fiercely to take back their capital along side the Swedes and the Cossacks, it was not Tildy who accepted the surrender of the German garrison on October 3. It was Ivan Drenekovich, commander of the 5th Cossacks.
Liberating the Camps
The true horror of the crusades, was not on the battlefields, were over ten million soldiers were killed. It was not even in the cities across Europe where tens million were killed in sieges and air raids. It was in the concentration and death camps scattered across Eastern Europe. When soldiers go into combat, they accept the fact they could die. When civilians die during the battle, they are collateral damage. When they were placed in the camps, it was murder on an industrial scale.
The first camps liberated were a shock to the Swedish Army. Tens of thousands of emaciated inmates, tens of thousands more dead.. Two more months fighting in the Balkans, and a dozen more camps were liberated. Swedish officials carefully documented the camps and captured Steel Helmet documents. The Helmets were methodical about keeping records. Executed inmates were written down with inhuman accuracy. The job was too big for the Swedish Army to handle alone. The Red Cross rushed to the Balkans in the wake of Swedish advances, attempting to save those who were not beyond hope. It is estimated that nearly seven million Slavs were killed in the camps.
When partisans and remnants of the Red Army liberated their first camp, the Balkans no longer gave quarter to the Nationalist’s henchmen. Any soldier, whether regular army or Steel Helmet paramilitary, were killed on sight. The Balkans took out revenge upon the Nationalist Germans. A contingent of Serbian partisans, under the command of General Stephan Filipovic, launched their own attack against a Swedish ran POW camp. The Swedish guards stood back helpless, as eight thousand Serbs slaughtered every prisoner in the camp.
Most Balkan units and partisans remained in the Balkans, hunting down German holdouts and collaborators. Filipovic’s Brigade followed the Swedish Army northwest, raiding into Austria and Bohemia, taking their revenge to the German people. On the march north, the Swedes liberated more camps, this time labor camps. Hundreds of thousands more Balkans were liberated from these camps. Freeing the prisoners slowed the Swedish Army’s advance, but the fate of Nationalist Germany was sealed by 1946. It was the Cossacks who spearheaded the final thrust into the heart of the Reich.
It is said that when the Kaiser returned to his palace in Berlin, and saw the city in ruins, he fell to his knees and wept. For all the devastation in Europe, one can not forget that at the core of the conflict was a German civil war. For years, German fought fellow German, all of them subjects of the Kaiser. So many of his people died in the conflict, and so much stress ate away at the Kaiser’s health, that he died just over a year after the war’s end.
Reconstruction
Bringing the Southern states back into the Union proved to be a far more formidable challenge that first believed. Some in Congress wondered if it was even worth the effort. With the exception of the Bund, whose surviving top members were either executed or sentenced to long terms in prison, the southerners kept their own political parties. The Democratic Party, who was far more socially conservative than either Progressive or Socialist, saw many prominent southerners joined its ranks. This caused much discontent among the fiscal conservative Democrats, who broke away to form the Libertarian Party in the 1970s.
The level of poverty in the south, coupled by the devastation inflicted by a short and brutal war, forced the loyal Union states to subsidize reconstruction for decades. Northerners feared a black diaspora, were black refugees would flood northern cities. Many blacks did migrate north during the war, after the Confederate surrender, to take over factory positions abandoned by potential men-at-arms. Many of the Confederate blacks flooded black American neighborhoods, especially in Haarlem after war’s end. The industrial cities of the north also saw an increase in black population. There was a great concern over the fact that they might not assimilate into American society. These fears were unfounded, for the black southerners proved to be more loyal and cooperative than their white counterparts.
All white men within former Confederate states were subjected to loyalty tests. Those who would serve in the American Foreign Legions during the 1930s and 1940s were automatically made United States citizens upon discharge, but the civilian populace proved far more difficult to administer. If anything, it was Dixie, not former slaves, that took decades to assimilate into the fusion of European and West African (along with native influence) that comprised American culture. This was most extreme when southern Representatives and Senators returned to the capital. In 1920, as a symbol of reunification, the capital returned to the city of Washington.
Cooperation between State governments and the Federal Government was far from smooth. In the cases of some states, such as Virginia and Arizona, regions within the state were divided as to how to relate with the new reality. Western Arizonans proved more reliable than their eastern comrades. So reliable in fact, that the Federal Government divided the state in half, transforming the west into Jefferson Territory. A similar happenings occurred in Virginia. Lands west of the Appalachians were never happy with the Confederacy. Those counties formed a Constitutional Convention of their own, calling for succession from Virginia. Counties north of the Rappahanock River joined the convention. The end result was a new territory. Perhaps as one final slap to the Southern States, Congress named the new territory Lincoln.
In 1952, the southerners fielded their first candidate for United States President, South Carolina statesman Strom Thurman on the Democratic ticket. Though he carried the southern states, he was easily defeated by Progressive candidate, Dwight Eisenhower. Despite not winning a single electoral vote from the southern states readmitted at the time, Ike still had a plan to reunite the nation. His pet project was called the Interstate Highway and Commerce Act. When passed in Congress, the act allowed for the construction of a network of freeways to allow rapid transportation of military and commercial traffic across the country. In twenty years, over ten thousand miles of freeway were laid down across the restored United States.
In reuniting the nation, the Progressives continued with their closed border policy. With the task of integrating millions of former Confederates at hand, the nation could not afford to allow an influx of immigrants. The most extreme of hard-core confederates called themselves the Ku Klux Klan, the pro-white anti-black brotherhood started out as a social club, but soon devolved into a violent, terrorist organization, that still plagues the south.
The Union of Balkan Socialist Republics
During March and April of 1920, Belgrade hosted a convention of leaders from throughout the Balkans. Presiding over the convention was the man who started the Revolution; Peter Karadordevic. Rapidly approaching eighty years of age, his health was further taxed by keeping the unruly Balkans under control. It was through his force of personality that the Congress of Belgrade occurred at all. Despite the clear threat from outside powers, the Balkan nations could not come to consensus on how to approach it. Nationalist wanted to create a loose confederation, or even just an alliance. Karadordevic had other ideas. His faction of the Congress moved for political unification of the Balkans into what would nominally be a federation of socialist republics.
His staunchest ally in the Congress was the Croatian Ante Trumbic. Near the end of the Congress, he gave a speech that clearly outlined that if the Brotherhood of Workers did not hang together, they would most certainly hang separately. Furthermore, he was a Croatian, and Karadordevic was a Serbian. If Serb and Croat could put their histories aside for the cause of progress of man, then any nationality in the Balkans could. It was with this Congress that the nation of Balkans was established.
On May 1, 1920, the delegates signed the Articles of Federation, a document that forged a union between the Balkan states. It was on May Day that the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was founded. This is not to say that the Congress was without debate. Many resisted unifying the Balkans and surrendering their sovereignty to Belgrade. The loudest of the opposition also failed to show up the day following their anti-union speeches. It is believed that the I.B.W. quickly purged these delegates; the first of many purges that would plague the communist Balkans.
After the articles were signed, and quickly ratified by the communist parties in their respective nations, the new Supreme Soviet elected its first Premier, none other than the General-Secretary of the I.B.W. Peter Karadordevic. His reign was short lived; in late 1920, he suffered a massive stroke, and shortly into 1921, the first Premier died, leaving a power vacuum that threatened to tear the Union apart. Ante Trumbic quickly promoted himself to General-Secretary, and Premier of the UBSR.
The Karadordevic legacy was more than uniting fractured peoples. His pet project; government control over food supply, is credited for diverting famine on more than one instance during the 1920s and 1930s. The plan called for the state to purchase excess grain while prices were low, and stockpile it. When prices rose or production dropped, the excess grain was dumped on the market, thus controlling prices. State control over farms, and collectivization of said farms was also hoped to maintain high productions. Though the process of collectivization caused shortages, it was the Ministry of Health that prevented famine from ravaging the Balkans.
More damaging to the populace of the Balkan Union than collectivization, was that of crash industrialization during the late 1920s and ‘30s. To industrialize, the I.B.W. virtually enslaved the people it claimed to liberate. Under the regime of Trumbic, the first step in industrialization was undertaken. To build factories, one must be able to deliver raw material to the factories. With this in mind, Trumbic designed plans to improve, or rather create, an infrastructure uniting all the Balkan nations. Tens of thousands of kilometers of rail and road were laid down between 1922 and 1927. To supply the road gangs with a constant stream of workers, Trumbic ordered a series of purges to weed out counter-revolutionary elements.
The first to be sent to forced labor camps were everybody who benefitted under the old regime. Oddly enough, this included the very middle class that supported the Revolution to begin with. Anybody with ties to the old regime’s administration were immediately sentenced to hard labor. Tax collectors were simply shot. Some of Trumbic’s own comrades found themselves in labor camps. Dusan Simovic was sentenced in February of 1940, and would have likely died in the work gangs, if not for the counter-revolutionary crusades of the 1940s.
Conditions in the road gangs were brutal for even the healthiest of individuals. One stretch of highway through the Carpathian Mountains became known as the Road of Skulls, for the numbers of workers who died during its construction. During the winter of 1925, on a road that would connect the Transylvanian BSR with the Wallachian BSR, some twenty thousand workers died of exposure. Some of the dead’s only crime was being born to parents who worked for the Ottomans.
No matter how bad the road gangs were, the miners suffered even worse. Those sentence to the mine seldom lived to see freedom. In the coal mines of the Bulgarian BSR, a tight quota system was in use. Those who did not meet their quota of coal did not receive their quota of ration. When they did meet their quotas, the quotas were often increased due to mine management believing the miners could worker harder. Similar quota systems were used in the forestry gangs of the Hungarian BSR.
By 1927, steel mills sprung up across the Balkans like mushrooms. Workers who toiled in these mills lived longer lives and received better treatment, but it was just as hazardous as the mines. Safety inspection was unheard of, and when workers suffered injury they were removed and replaced. In the Novi Sad Iron Works, an average of one worker per week was killed during 1928. Oil production was not as hazardous on average, but an explosion at the Ploesti fields claimed the lives of some three thousand workers on September 11, 1929.
Five-Year Plans
Trumbic’s first five-year plan called for the full scale industrialization of the Balkan Union. Before the Balkan Union was founded, some ninety percent of the Balkan population worked in agriculture. The first five-year plan in 1922, called for this to be reduced to fifty percent by 1932. The forceful relocation of hundreds of thousands of peasants further disrupted food production. To compensate, the second five-year plan called for mass production of agricultural machinery to replace the lost workers. Though production dropped, government food rationing prevented famine from taking hold. The time between 1922 and 1932 were a lean time for the Balkans.
Furthermore, Trumbic called for the production of steel to reach one million tonnes by 1932. Coal and oil would both reach two million by the same year. Electricity was planned to be in fifty percent of Balkan homes by 1932, but this quota fell short. In 1932, a purge of the Ministry of Energy removed some of the Balkan’s more capable administrators. Dams were built across the Balkans, leading to a further displacement of peoples. These were rounded up and sent to training camps, were they would be trained in industries such as steel, fabric and machinery.
The third five-year plan, 1932 to 1937, called for a five hundred percent increase in the production of agricultural machinery. By 1936, each collective farm had at least one tractor. The tractors were of poor quality, and a trained mechanic had to be provided by the state. Upon learning of the design flaw in the Model 1931 Tractor, Trumbic purged the entire design board of Mikail-Grosniv Industrial Bureau. Along with farming equipment, the production of automobiles was to increase by two hundred percent.
In the same five-year plan, Trumbic called for the establishment of a military-industrial complex in the Balkans. Before 1932, the Balkan Union had no armor, a few Great War aircraft, some rusting ships based in the Greek BSR, and only limited manufacture of bolt-action rifles. Several bureaus were established, chief among them was the Belgrade Arsenal. The Belgrade Arsenal was expected to deliver fifty thousand pieces of artillery by 1937. It exceeded it quota by one-point-three percent.
Trumbic’s death in 1938, disrupted the fourth five-year plan. During the months of July and August, members of the I.B.W. vied against each other for power. The position of Premier devolved into a more ceremonial role, where a new premier would be elected out of the Supreme Soviet once every two years. The real power remained the general-secretary. By 1939, Ivan Mihailou, from the Macedonian BSR, seized control of the Party. His reign would be the shortest. Within a year, the first of the Crusades against communism would strike the Balkans.
Life under the New Regime
For the peasant in the Balkans, the Balkan Union offered some improvements in their quality of living. By 1940, electricity and indoor plumbing were in a majority of towns and all the cities. Some of the positive acts of the I.B.W. is to enact universal education in two dozen languages across the entire Union. Education became mandatory, and the literacy rates tripled from 1920 to 1930. Along with education, the state provided health care. Before the Revolution, most Balkans relied upon folk remedies and superstition to combat ailments. By 1940, modern medical care was universal, albeit a generation behind the rest of Europe.
For the average Balkan, the State and the Party was everywhere. The State not only planned the economy, but the way its people would live out their lives. Religion, which is diverse in the Balkans, was suppressed for that very reason. Churches and mosques were seized by the states and converted into schools, courthouses and even offices for the secret police. The Haiga Sofia in Constantinople became the headquarters of the Red Navy. With ancient beliefs suppressed, the people only had the state to look to for guidance.
For food and other daily supplies, the average Balkan was forced to wait in queues for hours just to get their weekly ration of meat or dairy, or even for a new pair of shoes. The same waits accompanied a Balkan no matter where they went. If they wished to visit the doctor, they had to wait in line. If they wished to ride the rail, the same. A Balkan spent much of their life waiting. The rest was spent worrying. They dared not complain, for nobody was certain whether the person in the next flat was an informant. The secret police ran off anonymous tips. Sometimes the threats were real, but more often or not, they were imagined by the informant, and the state (especially under Trumbic) was more than willing to believe the worse. A Balkan’s life was a mixed blessing compared to their parents; a higher standard of living, but quite possibly, a shorter life.
Pre-war Year
The Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was still a third-rate military power by 1940. Despite Trumbic’s attempts to force industrialization, the Union still lacked the industrial power to match any of the world powers in military hardware production. The Belgrade Arsenal produced more than enough artillery pieces to defend the frontier, however, ammunition production was lagging due to Trumbic’s purges. The practice of mass executions of entire departments do to lack of satisfactory work was halted by Mihailou. He saw the logic in keeping experienced hands, even if they do error from time to time.
At the start of November, 1940, the Red Navy had refitted the ships captured during the Balkan Revolution. Only a handful of new ships were built, no larger than a destroyer. Trumbic did not believe any war would be a naval war. Instead, he focused industry on Army production. This includes the Macedonian Tank Works, which produced some seven thousand Red Star tanks. The Red Stars were of high quality, the Red Army lacked the tank doctrine to use them properly. The Tank Works survived the Crusades, despite air raids from all sides, and continued to produce tanks for all sides during the Balkan Wars.
At the time of invasion, the Balkan Union’s GNP was a third of that which Germany possessed. Multiple embargoes against it hurt its economy. It did have trade with Kurdistan, Armenia and the Arab Republic. By 1940, it also had diplomatic relations with most countries, the notable exceptions being lack of ambassadors from Madrid, Paris and Berlin. Its largest export was the Revolution itself. Advisors from the Balkan Union were embroiled in the Chinese Civil War, supply Mao with weapons and aiding in combating other factions and the Japanese.
Overall, by the time of the German Invasion, the Balkans were finally starting to climb out of the Dark Ages and join the modern world.
Reforms at Home
During the Great War, the lack of cohesion in Commonwealth Armed Forces greatly distress King Frederick III. How was the Commonwealth suppose to survive a serious threat if each nation had its own army, navy and now air force, along with independent chains of command. In 1918, Frederick launched his own campaign to fully integrate the Commonwealth’s military. The various Staaten-Generals around the Commonwealth resisted the idea, arguing their militaries were internal affairs. However, the King argued that since the Commonwealth had a united and common foreign policy, including declaring war, then it should have a common and united military.
The King had his allies across the Commonwealth. The King always has allies. No matter the state, whether it be Brazil, Transvaal, India or even the United Provinces, there were always those Electorates and Senators that looked toward their common monarch (though minus the monarch part in the Boer Republics) for leadership. Though political parties were illegal in some states, that did not stop ‘monarchist’ organizations from forming.
More nationalistic elements opposed these so-called Monarchists. They claimed that by integrating the Commonwealth’s armed forces, they would be stripping the member states of their sovereignty. First the military, then taxes and domestic laws. Where would the Commonwealth Assembly stop? Until all the members were reduced to colonies of the Hague? The King had no desire to strip his kingdoms and empires of their status as realms. Brazil and Ceylon would keep their own academies, and all the states would have their militias, but the Commonwealth as a whole could not afford to have its armies divided along national lines.
The United Provinces were in favor of it, if for no other reason than it gave them a vast number of recruits to use in defense of the Provinces. That alone made the proposal suspect. Brazilians had little desire to be stations in the Provinces, and the Indians certainly did not wish to defend their former overlords. Strangely enough, all the Boer Republics were in favor of integration. The Boers might have been a powerful voting block, if they could ever agree on anything. During the Great War, Kapenstaaten refused to send soldiers to aid Johannestaaten in beating back British raids. If all the states were to pool their military manpower, then perhaps they could better defend Commonwealth members.
When the vote came up before the Commonwealth Assembly, there were eight in favor, and India and Brazil opposed. Though against it, once the Act of Integration and Armed Forces Reform was passed, they grudgingly abided by it. By 1920, the Commonwealth established a common chain of command, with the King at the top, and various generals stations around the world. It was not until 1922, that the actual armies began to pool their resources, and merged into new divisions. The 1st Royal Guards Division, based in the County of Holland, and under the command of the Count, lost half of its Netherlander manpower, and saw it replaced by an influx of Brazilian, Ceylonese, Boer and Indians soldiers. Thanks to Frederick’s ‘If One Falls, the Next Will Follow’ propaganda campaign, not all soldiers were dissatisfied by the monumental shuffling of up to two million men at arms throughout the 1920s.
The navies had an easier time of integrating. Aside from shuffling of crews on board the ships, and transfer of those ships, the only cosmetic change was that the nations flag was lowered to second place, and the Commonwealth flag fluttered at the top. Also, gone was the HMS, to be replaced by DCS (Dutch Commonwealth Ship). Unlike the armies, the navies’ territorial boundaries were the oceans of Earth. Brazilian and Ceylonese ships could sail into each other’s harbors just as easily as they could Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Integrations of Commonwealth forces lasted until 1935. Frederick III saw his visions of a united Commonwealth Armed Forces fulfilled just shortly before his own death.
Kingdom of New Holland
By 1919, the colony of New Holland grew substantially from its gold rush days. Gone were the mining camps, the saloons and the outlaws. When the gold was either depleted or taken over by companies, the rift raft eventually blew out of town, looking for the next big strike. Gold was again discovered in American and northern Canada, and the adventures chased after it. Gold changed everything in New Holland. Before its discovery, the inhabitants were content just herding their sheep and living the simple life.
After its discover, New Holland’s economy rapidly expanded and transformed the backwater province of the Indonesian colonial department into a separate entity. Revenue from mining was spent to build roads and rails, to provide water and irrigation and generally improve the colony. It had been a long standing Dutch philosophy stating government’s only real duty was to instigate public works, roads, aqueducts and so on. That was precisely what New Holland did, and its standard of living surpassed the rest of Indonesia, with the exception of Java.
By the end of the Great War, in which many New Hollanders fought with Indian and Ceylonese divisions against the British in both India and Australia. Fighting in their own backyard, the New Hollanders felt they earned their right to be a full member of the Commonwealth. New Holland was no longer satisfied with the limited self-determination granted to them by the United Provinces. They now demanded full self-governing as a realm within the empire.
In late 1918, delegates met in Apeldoorn to draft a constitution for New Holland. For the most part, these delegates were the higher ranking New Hollander officers along with a few influential members of the rural society. The prospect of the military writing a constitution left many in the Hague unsettled. After hearing about the convention, the United Provinces send their own delegates to oversee the writing, to ensure the constitution was up to Commonwealth standards.
To the observer’s surprise, the New Holland Constitution was far more progressive than any other. It called for equal rights for all inhabitants of New Hollands, European and Aboriginal, citizen and resident alike. It went even further, making New Holland the first member of the Dutch Commonwealth to insure universal suffrage for all citizens over the age of nineteen. Universal suffrage in New Holland would have ramifications across all Commonwealth members across the decade of the 1920s.
Satisfied that the New Hollanders exceeded expectations, the observers returned home, bringing with them the petition to join. In July of 1919, summer in the Hague yet winter in Apeldoorn, the Commonwealth Assembly approved New Holland’s admittance into the Commonwealth and bestowing to it statehood, full self-governing and making it another realm within the empire. The biggest debate within the constitution convention was what to make New Holland. There was little desire for a republic and much love for the King. Some believed New Holland was too small to be a Kingdom and proposed adopting a Principality, yet Frederick III was not a man to take a demotion. September 7, 1919, Frederick visited Apeldoorn in a tour of the Indian Ocean, and was crowned King of New Holland by its own Staaten-General.
Amendments
The biggest change in Commonwealth society, for all the states (except India, which was later in following) was giving women the franchise. For most of the history of the United Provinces, it was only the men who could vote, and not until the post-Napoleonic constitution that it was guaranteed in writing for all men. Women began to wonder that since they were citizens as well, why could they not vote? After New Holland became a fully independent member of the Dutch Commonwealth, the female population of other states looked on with envy as their counterparts on the Australian continent passed their votes.
Between 1920 and 1926, each member, with the exception of India, passed amendments to their constitution allowing for universal suffrage, starting with the United Provinces in December of 1920. India, given its deeply patriarchal history and conservative nature, has always been one of the slower members to progress with the rest of the world, but not without resistance from the Princes and Mullahs scattered across the subcontinent.
In the United Provinces, a series of colonial acts were passed, granting more self-governance to the colonies. By the time Frederick took the additional title of King of New Zealand in 1922, it was clear to those in the Hague that all the colonies would one day gain independence and membership into the Dutch Commonwealth. The Dutch believed it better to give the colonists the tools and experienced advisors to make it possible. For the most part, the colonies welcomed self-governance. They did not have full control over their own internal affairs, still having a governor-general appointed by the Staaten-General, and still subject to taxation from the Hague.
Iceland; the Nineteenth Province
By 1927, the future status of the closest of the United Provinces’ colonies, Iceland, came into question. Originally settled over a millennia ago by Vikings from Norway, the island was inherited by William II after the death of the last Danish King in the Seventeenth Century. For centuries, the Dutch gave little regard to the possession, using it as an excellent fishery and before the advent of petrochemicals, for whaling stations.
When Denmark regained its independence after the Congress of Vienna, the United Provinces held on to the island, along with Norway. However, Norway was one of the United Provinces immediately after the Act of Union in 1705, while Iceland remained a colonial possession, with no self-determination or regional government to mention. Its proximity to the Hague made it easy to control every aspect of the island’s management directly, without the need to appoint a governor-general.
Along with no consent over their own rule, the Icelander also lacked any say in the issue of taxation. Though low in population, Iceland paid its share of taxes to the mother country. Though the quantity of taxes were low, the key fish tax impacted the lives of everyone on Iceland. By the time distant New Zealand obtained independence, the Icelanders were looking forward to their own future. Should they not be independent.
Iceland lacked the population, even compared to the five hundred thousand inhabitants of New Zealand, to ever hope to remain a viable nation. If the Dutch did not rule over it, then only a matter of time would pass before the British or Swedes took possession of the island. Its location in the North Atlantic, along with Greenland and the Province of Norway gave the United Provinces a half-ring around Britain and a stranglehold on the much larger Swedish Empire. The Staaten-General would not give up control over Iceland.
The Icelanders could not very well stop eating fish, however, they boycotted any imports for the Dutch Commonwealth. Since Commonwealth ships were nearly exclusive in importing commerce onto the island, 1927 became a year of shortage in Iceland. With only fifty thousand inhabitants, Iceland could not hope to even scratch the Commonwealth’s economy, however traders were vexed enough by the boycott that they went to the Hague and petitioned the Staaten-General to force open the door.
To do so would likely cause the volcanic island to erupt into violence. With the exception of the Boer Wars, the Dutch nations have evolved without bloodshed. The current members of the Staaten-General were not about to be the first to revoke the sacred Dutch right to protest. However, they could not simply appease the Icelanders, for concern it might encourage other colonials to start their own embargoes. Iceland might not mean much to the economy, but if Formosa or Java did the same, it might prove problematic.
It was Otto, Duke of Bergen, who came up with the proposal in the Senaat. His own Province, Norway, was once a simple crown possession until it was admitted as a Province. Grant it, Denmark-Norway was an entire nation in personal union with the United Provinces, and Provincial status was stipulated in the treaty, whereas Iceland was but an island in the Atlantic. Otto proposed that Iceland should either be made a Province or annexed by Norway. The annexation was immediately rejected by every other member of the Senaat. For three hundred years, the First Chamber of the Staaten-General struggled to ensure no Province became overwhelmingly more powerful than the rest.
Before the decision could be made, the issue of who would represent Iceland in the Senaat was razed. Would Otto take the additional title of Duke of Iceland? No member of the Staaten-General would approve that. There was nobody qualified to take on such a title. The King might bestow it upon one of the generals or admirals during, but the Great War produced no Ernst van Bohr or Michel de Ruyter.
It was the Regent of Liege who came up with an acceptable compromise. The Bishopric of Liege had no hereditary ruler. Thanks to the deal made between the Bishop and Maurice van Oranje, Liege was eventually permitted to elect a regent. Perhaps Iceland should be the same. Whether the regency would be for life, or a limited term would be left for the Icelanders to decide. In 1927, the Staaten-General agreed to make Iceland the second nineteenth Province. The Icelanders, however, took an additional two years to form a government, elect a regent and gain admittance into the United Provinces.
Kingdom of Abyssinia
Between 1915 and 1916, the time of Dutch involvement in the Great War, some 50,000 Abyssinians served in the Royal Netherlands Army. Of those fifty thousand, only ethnic Dutch and Somali were allowed to serve overseas. They served with distinguish in Europe during the Siege of Mons and further action against the French. Ethiopians and other ethnicities in Abyssinia were stationed in Abyssinia itself on garrison duty. This was a great disappointment to many young Ethiopian men who wished to serve the crown and to seek adventure in the nightmare known as the Western Front.
The reason for this decision was that the Netherlander and Brazilian Army brass had great concerns the Ethiopians might dessert. The presence of British colonies all along the Abyssinian frontier lead some generals to believe Ethiopians might flock to the British in hopes of regaining their lost homeland. Little did the General realize, that by 1915, most Ethiopians were quite content with their Dutch rulers, and many began to consider themselves Dutch. More over, the Ethiopians and other natives liked the British even less than the Dutch. At least with the Dutch, the natives were left their own religion, and not subject to missionaries.
The entry of the Dutch Commonwealth into the war severely hampered the Abyssinian economy. Once war was declared, the British closed the Red Sea from the north and the Dutch from the south, effectively cutting off all commerce into the area. Any ships that did set sail were subject to attack by commerce raiders, or even pirates flying the colors of one Entente member or another. In respect to the Royal (Dutch) Navy, Ethiopians were allowed to serve, though their percentage was always kept in the single digit per ship. They served enthusiastically.
The closing of dams in the Ethiopian Highlands cut into the flow of the Blue Nile, and had devastating impact on Egypt. The missing of the annual flood in 1916 cause small scale famine across the country, forcing the British to divert resources to feed the populous and keep them from rising up during London’s time of crisis. This also lead to an abortive attempt by the British to invade Abyssinia and take control of the dams. Dutch units based along the northern frontier entered the Sudan and handily defeated an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of Sir William Haig, taking some five thousand prisoner.
The southern border of Abyssinia remained quiet through the whole war, with no official action taking place. The British did, however, encourage natives to raid across the border. In response to this, some enterprising Dutch and Somali living along the southern coast, took to the sea in their boats as “privateers”. In reality they were little more than pirates, raiding the East African coast. As long as they did not attack Dutch shipping, the Hague looked the other way. However, after peace was declared, they still continued to raid, and had not their dens burned out by the Commonwealth Navy until 1920.
Following the conclusion of the Great War, the Hague enacted a program to make Abyssinia a self-sufficient colony, requiring no imports in order to function as a modern nation. Through the 1920s, various industrialization programs were pushed through the Staaten-General. Canneries were constructed across Abyssinia to boost the coffee industry. Powered looms were built to turn wool from sheep and goats into clothing on a massive scale. Steel mills were built to churn out the steel for railroad tracks yet unlaid.
Along with becoming self-sufficient, attempts were made to have Abyssinian produce cheap products for consumption in the United Provinces. Of all the Commonwealth and colonies, Abyssinia had the lowest wages. There were two factors in this; it was only slightly more developed than the southern African colonies of Angola and Mozambique, but possessed a much larger population. Millions of unskilled labor fueled the supply side of the market in favor of large businesses ready to exploit the labor pool. Simply goods, such as pots, pans, chairs and other mass produced items in demand had their own factories set up in Abyssinia. Airstrips in Addis Ababa, Mogadishu and Djibouti serviced the flights and acted as a hub between Ceylon/India, the Boer Republics and the United Provinces. Given the limited range of aircraft at the time, several stop-overs were required along the route between Amsterdam and Colombo or Delhi.
In 1928, VOC Auto began construction on an automobile factory for domestic use of the Abyssinians, as well as VOC operation across Abyssinia. Newly paved roads opened a path for VOC Freight to begin operating trucks to and from railroad depots. The automobile factory produced far more than the VOC required, and the surplus was sold off to the natives. By 1930, parts of Abyssinian were transforming into little chunks of Holland or Brabant, transplanted in this fertile, eastern African land. Though standards of living have skyrockets in the previous fifty years, Abyssinia’s economy remained predominantly agrarian-based. Vitals were now in every village across the country, though electricity was still novel in rural communities. Nonetheless, before achieving statehood, Abyssinia was the most modernized area of East Africa.
By 1935, the Staaten-General in the Hague decided it was time for Abyssinia to hold a Constitution Convention. The organization of the both the Constitution and a series of referendum following it took up the entire year. The first debate between Dutch, Somali and Ethiopian delegates was whether or not to follow the example of Brazil or the Boer Republics. Will Abyssinia be a republic within the Commonwealth or in personal union with the United Provinces as a new monarchy. In June, the first of the referendums were held as first drafts of the Constitution for a monarchy and republic. Though it was modernized by African standards, almost a month passed before all the votes were round up and counted. Some 74% of the voters (of the half of eligible voters who actually voted) were in favor of monarchy. This was a proportionally high in the Dutch and Somali camps, where as more than half of the Ethiopians voted against the Dutch monarch. Even after decades, resentment still existed against the government in the Hague.
The second referendum, held in September of 1935, would decide the fate of the Constitution. Writing the monarchal Constitution was a quick affair. The Constitution of Abyssinia was based of that of Brazil, the United Provinces, Ceylon, New Holland and New Zeeland. As with most elections, the turnout was low compared to other Commonwealth states, with more than half of the Ethiopian population boycotting the election. This, of course, handed the election over to the Dutch and Somali, who passed the Constitution with 81%. The Constitution was slated to take effect on January 1, 1936. King Frederick III arrived in Abyssinia before that date. On his last world tour, the Commonwealth Fleet stopped in Mogadishu, where Frederick III was crowned King Frederick I of Abyssinia in an old colonial governor’s mansion in Mogadishu. He was the only monarch of Abyssinia to not visit the capital of Addis Ababa.
Succession Crisis of 1936
Near the end of his reign and life, Frederick III took one last title under his belt; the King of Abyssinia. For the most part, following the toppling of Emperor Theodore Abyssinia changed little. By 1935, only a small percentage of the population came from the United Provinces, and they bought up land to build coffee plantations. The Abyssinians resented the foreign conquest and occupation, yet reaped the benefits of improved trade and infrastructure.
Frederick’s coronation in the old governor’s mansion in Mogadishu represented the King’s last voyage overseas. It is not known exactly what the King died from, but it is believed to be from complications of tropical diseases. Frederick managed to outlive his brothers, and their sons, the last one dying indirectly from wounds received during the Great War. By 1935, the question of who would succeed Frederick to the throne was up in the air. One faction of the Senaat supported bringing a distant cousin into the core of the House of Oranje. Very few were in favor of simply declaring the House of Oranje extinct.
When the King finally died in early 1936, the United Provinces’ Staaten-General continued the debate, as did the Brazilians and Indians. The Boers cared little who their ‘lord protector’ was since that position was little more than ceremonial. The real power laid in the hands of the elected officials. Ceylon held off debate, waiting to see what the United Provinces would do. The decision of who would be head of the Commonwealth was not in the hands of the largest members, but its smallest.
Days after the King’s death, the New Holland Staaten-General nominated Frederick’s only surviving child, Juliana, to become Queen of New Holland. New Zealand followed suit in March. Before Juliana could accept, she would have to receive the approval of her own Staaten-General. Though Salic succession was not law in the Provinces, it was long standing tradition. Juliana was beloved by the people and had the full support of the House of Electorates, but this was a matter of state not the people, and thus the responsibility of the Senaat.
Over the course of the Spring of 1936, the Staaten-General was eventually won over to Juliana. By then, Ceylon and Brazil offered their crowns to her as well. In August 1936, Juliana took the crown and became the first Queen of the United Provinces. She was not Empress of India until late December, due to opposition of the native princes. In fact, she was almost crowned Princess of Java before Empress of India.
Java gained its own independence within the Commonwealth in January of 1937. While the debate for the monarch raged in national assemblies, the Commonwealth Assembly debated to status of Java. Should it be admitted as a single island, or should it be grouped with the rest of Indonesia. New Holland already broke away from the archipelago, and without Java, the islands were far poorer– that is until the discovery of petroleum around the island.
Java had less oil than Borneo or Sumatra. The Sultan of Brunei struck a deal with the VOC’s new division, VOC Oil. VOC Oil started off as Dutch Royal Shell in the early 1900s. Like with rail and steam, the VOC risked large sums of capital on unproven technology. When they bought Shell in the 1920s, it was still unknown if automobiles would run on petrol or electric. Inventors in Edison Labs in New Amsterdam continued to improve battery technology, making it almost on par with the inefficient engines. VOC’s own automotive division, VOC Auto, made headway in improving the efficiency of early Twentieth Century internal combustion engines.
They bet on gasoline and diesel as the fuel of the future. During the late 1930s, the gross colonial production of the remaining Indonesian islands doubled before 1940. The islands welcomed the reign of Juliana with high hopes for its future. Future division of the islands was put on hold until they developed to the point to be granted the status of a realm within the empire. However, Juliana’s reign did not start on a completely positive note. Enemies of the Dutch Commonwealth began to rebuild after the devastation following the Great War.
Mechanization of the VOC
In 1911, the VOC saw a new potential source of expansion. The aeroplane (or airplane) was a new invention, less than a decade old. It originated in the United States, though American engineers competed with Europeans to develop the first heavier-than-air ship. In the United Provinces, Willem and Georg Fokker established a small shop to produce aircraft in 1907. Fokker Aircraft was a marginal success, barely keeping ahead of their debts as they sought out customers. They entered a partnership with the VOC in 1911, where Fokker Aircraft was purchased and renamed VOC Air, with the brothers left in charge. With the VOC’s capital and the Fokker brother’s engineering, the venture was to meet with success.
The VOC first used and sold aircraft as fast messengers in the years before radio communication (soon adopted into VOC Communication) became reliable. For customers who were willing to pay premium prices, VOC Air offered fast delivery of air mail between the Provinces. After the first year of the Great War, the Dutch governments soon were looking for aircraft of their own. VOC Air was but one of the companies they contracted, and did not even receive the largest contract. The VOC produced hundreds of scouting and recon aircraft for the Commonwealth throughout the war.
After the Great War, consumer interest in air travel came to the Company’s attention. The first VOC airliner was design in 1920, a fourteen seat, four engine, biplane. VOC Air started its first airline route in 1922. It was not in the United Provinces or Brazil, where railroad was still the preferred choice of motion, but between Transvaal and Johannestaaten. Air traffic between the distant towns of the five Boer Republics comprised the bulk of the VOC Air’s income for the 1920s, reaching out to towns too important to be isolated, but too small to justify the expensive of their own railroad line. In 1934, the VOC’s first flying boat began to carry passengers between the United Provinces, Brazil and the Boer Republics, with stop-overs between the U.P. and Brazil in the Azores, and between the Boer Republics and the two others in Cape Verde (though each had to refuel at more than just this one stop). Both islands were home to VOC-owned hotels where passengers were put up for the night.
The VOC was slow to catch on to the automotive industry. Though the railroad could not deliver goods directly to all points, the company believed that it more than made up for it volume and cost efficiency. The automobile during the last decade of the 19th Century and first of the 20th, the automobile was seen as a rich man’s toy. Not until Henry Ford perfected his assembly line approach, which lowered the cost to make automobiles marketable, did the VOC take notice. The VOC purchased a number of ford trucks to augment VOC Rail. These trucks worked for teamsters under VOC contract to deliver goods from the rail depot directly to the store.
It was not until 1924, when the company established VOC Auto and built its first plant in Brazil. VOC Auto was never intended to mass produce motorcars for the public. Instead, it produced thousands of trucks, mostly for company use but also sold to other trucking companies as well as freelance teamsters. There was some debate in the Board about going into the mass consumer market, but by the middle of the 1920s, the market was becoming saturated. The automobile industry, with its reliable and long-lasting vehicles, was a bubble just waiting to burst.
New Enemies
While the Dutch Commonwealth experienced an economic boom along with the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, several other nations faced turmoil. The French economy was heavily taxed by the Great War and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, that coupled with the Balkans Revolution saw the rise of extreme rightist and nationalistic parties, though never to the extent that hit Germany.
The Republic of Spain faced a major downward spiral during the 1920s. Weak central government and the loss of the Great War prompted various nationalities of the Iberians Peninsula to rise up. In 1921, Portugal rose up for the first time if fifty years. The rebellion in Lisbon and Porto was violently crushed by the Spanish Army. Catalonia and Grenada rose up in 1922, followed by Asturias in 1923. All three were crushed, though Catalonia managed to gain temporary independence. The Spanish Army was weaken severely by the uprisings and the aftermath of Versailles.
In 1924, the Basque, original inhabitants of Iberia predating Rome, rose up and declared independence. Again the Spanish Army attempted to crush the uprising. However, the Basque learned from the earlier uprisings, and spent years planning their rebellion. In the Pyrenees, near the French border, the Spanish Army was defeated by the rebel Basques. The Army faced a near complete defeat at the hands of the Basque four weeks later.
By 1925, the Basque Republic was established, and the Spanish parliament entered into negotiations with the rebels. Furthermore, Spanish politicians pushed forward a new constitution, this one allowing autonomy for all nationalities. These concessions were more than a cadre of junior officers within the Spanish Army could stand. In their eyes, the reason the Basque defeated the Spanish Army was not do to will of the soldiers, but ineptitude of the commanding officers. Generals and colonels in Spain were, for the most part, political appointees.
Some officer, lead by Don Carlos de Vega, approached the eldest member of the exiled House of Bourbon, Carlos Bourbon, offering to restore the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. In the eyes of the junior officers, restoration of the monarchy would be the first step to restoring Spain’s greatness. And by installing Carlos as King, the junior officers would gain his favor, not to mention advise him and help remake the Spanish Army into a fighting force to make the Duke of Parma proud.
August 8, 1925, the junior officers simultaneously stormed the parliament building and the Spanish High Command. Members of parliament were all placed under arrest and removed from office. The generals who brought so much disgrace to the country were unceremoniously shot. Many of the parliament were sentenced to hard labor in prison, while the rest fled to France and the Italian Federation. On August 15, after the mass executions and sentencing, the officers roused the bishop in Madrid, ordering him to crown the new king.
That evening, King Carlos V restored the monarchy, and on the advisement of the junior officers, he abolished parliament. Condemnation of the rebirth of absolutism rang out across the continent, and further fueled the fires of revolution in the Balkans, and gave leftist parties in each country a new target to blast. As for the junior officers, they were promoted by the King of Spain and formed a Council of Generals to advise the new absolute monarch. Their first act was to crush the Basque Republic with such force, tens of thousand of refugees fled into France and across the Atlantic.
Turmoil did not strike further until the 1930s. In 1935, unrest grew within the German Empire, much of it fomented by the Steel Helmet League. This quasi-political, paramilitary organization consisted of hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Great War. Many veterans returned to their lives after the war, feeling cheated of victory. By all rights, Germany should have achieved the same level of success as the United States. Quitting so close to victory felt like a betrayal of the people by the Kaiser and the German upper classes.
One soldiers, a disgruntled and unemployed sergeant by the name of Reinhert Heuss, rose through the ranks of the organization. His status as a non-commissioned officer did much to help in his rise to power. He wore it as a badge of honor, proclaiming to the German people that he was more trustworthy than any blue-blooded officer. Following the demobilization of the German Army, Heuss, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers like him, were discharged to face the world alone. With so much of the Germany industry geared for war in the process of winding down, these soldiers joined the masses of unemployed.
Heuss was one of the many, with no home or job, depending on the charity of others for a living. As a former soldier, one who fought to preserve the Fatherland, he thought he was entitled to more than destitution. The Steel Helmets formed after the war ended, as such a charity. Made up of better-off soldiers, the Steel Helmets were determined to assist their former comrades. The fact that the State seemed to care little of those who fought in its name, sometimes made the Steel Helmets appear to be the only ones who cared.
Their status as a helping hand did not last. Being made of former soldiers, the Steel Helmet League was a fiercely nationalistic. Heuss might not have had much in the way of trade skills, but he was a master orator. He used this nationalism as well as the feelings of betrayal to catapult himself to the forefront of the organization. He could not come out and accuse the Kaiser of treason, for the Kaiser could easily have him arrested. Instead, he focused his fellow Helmets’ anger on a more politically acceptable target; the Slavs.
Heuss was not the only one who was convinced the Central Powers would have won had the Reds not risen. From 1927 onward, it was the Slavs who were the traitors. They rose up under a communist banner and stabbed the German-speaking world in the back. Never mind that the Slavs of the former Habsburg Empire were not there by choice. Fear of communism did much to drive Germans into the arms of the Steel Helmets. Heuss made Slav and Communist interchangeable. As far as he was concerned, they were one in the same.
Through the early 1930s, more and more members elected to the Reichstag were also members of the Steel Helmets. A great portion of the German Army joined the Helmets, for after all, what harm could a nationalistic organization do to its own country? What it could do was shown on February 13, 1935, when after a year of planning, Heuss made his move. It all began as a general strike in the larger cities of Germany. The Kaiser’s government sent out soldiers to attempt to break these strikes. To the Kaiser’s dismay, more than half of the army sent out turned their weapons in favor of the Steel Helmets.
In Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, Munich and Vienna, Steel Helmets stormed government buildings. The Kingdom of Bavaria was the first of the German states to succumb to the Steel Helmets. The King attempted to flee north at first, only to find his path blocked. South was a better option, even if it meant fleeing to Italy. He was not the first monarch to find himself deposed by the Steel Helmet Revolution.
By April 20, the Steel Helmets were in charge of most of the German states, with a mob of over a million marching on Berlin. As they were mostly former or current soldiers, the mob marched with great order. They faced off against soldiers loyal to the Kaiser at Dresden on April 23. Though lighter armed than the German Army, the Helmets nonetheless outnumbered them by ten-to-one. Through great losses the Helmets pressed on their march, only to be stopped against outside of Berlin. On April 30, the Kaiser was advised to evacuated.
Though much of the Army had joined the Helmets, the High Seas Fleet was staunchly loyal to the Kaiser. On May 3, the Kaiser boarded the battleship Baden, where he and many officers loyal to him, left for exile. Along with the Kaiser, almost the entire High Seas Fleet, as well as most of the Luftwaffe, and some of the Empire’s most brilliant generals, departed their homeland and steamed for the River Platte Colony.
Heuss wasted no time in declaring a German Republic, and calling for an immediately constitutional convention. Naturally, this convention will controlled and ran by the Steel Helmets. It was to nobody’s surprise that Heuss was elected the first President of the German Republic. Nor was it a surprise when the new constitution abolished all privileges and nobility. What was a surprise, though one not noticed at the time, was a clause within the constitution that allowed the President to rule by decree in the event of emergency. With parts of Germany still in chaos, emergencies were not hard to find.
The international reaction to this coup was mixed. The French Republic rejoiced in seeing their old enemy the Kaiser removed from power. They were the first in Europe to recognize the new republic. Most of the European monarchies refused to recognize Heuss’s government, with the notable exception of Spain. Reaction across the Atlantic were far sharper. The United States government refused to recognize the new state, despite the fact it was a republic and that the U.S. often supported fledgling republics. President Victor Abrams declared his nation would stand firmly behind their ally, the Kaiser.
The Crusades
Heuss spent the next three years placing Germany back into order. This is a rather clinically sterile way of saying he used the time to eliminate all opposition to his role. The purges of 1937 proved to be nearly as bloody as the purges in the Balkan Union. The Army suffered as any and all of the Imperialists were systematically removed from power. Heuss’s quick and brutal actions prevented a full-scale civil war between Imperialists and Nationalists by several years. Once threats were removed and the Steel Helmets consolidated their power, Heuss turned southeast towards his greatest enemy.
On November 30, 1940, the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was introduced to modern warfare. In the morning of November 30, thousands of aircraft crossed the border and bombarded every major city within a thousand kilometers of the northern border. Budapest suffered severe firestorms on the nights of December 2 and 3, reducing five square kilometers of the city to ash and rubble.
By December 1, over two hundred thousand Nationalist German soldiers crossed the northern frontier. Three main thrusts were in the works; one to Budapest, one to Zagreb and a third to Bratislava. Zagreb was the first to fall, on December 8, when the 1st Panzer Group (12th Army) rolled into the city with minimal opposition. Bratislava was declared an open city and occupied on December 10. Budapest was a tougher nut for the Germans to crack. Two divisions of the Red Army, under the command of Vladka Macek, denied the city to 5th Panzer Division and the 2nd Steel Helmet Division Das Reich for two weeks. During this period, the city suffered continuing aerial bombardment, despite already having its heart burned out days before.
The Battle of Budapest was a vicious fight, with Nationalist German forces leveling entire city blocks to dislodge the Red Army. The city in ruins finally fell on December 23. During this same period, three German divisions had the capital of Belgrade surrounded and under siege. The Siege of Belgrade lasted between December 13, 1940 to January 7, 1941, when the city surrendered. Most of the higher echelons of the I.B.W. melted away into the population. A number of them were captured, including Ivan Mestrovic, who died in the Kotor concentration camp in 1942. Once in Nationalist German hands, the city of Belgrade was renamed Prinzeugenestadt, and the Steel Helmets went to work preparing the general vicinity for future German colonization. During 1941-1942, over a hundred thousand people were deported from the city to the camps.
The Closest the Red Army came to stopping the Nationalist Germans came on January 28, during the Battle of Pristina. Two German armored divisions squared off against three armored divisions of the Red Army, in what came to be known as the largest tank battle of Operation Krusader. The Red Army, lead by General Nikos Zachariadis, blunted several drives by the Germans during the course of the morning. One counterattack even managed to push back a panzer brigade several kilometers.
In the end, what decided the battle was not the quality of armor or armor tactics, but control of the air. The paltry Nationalist Luftwaffe dominated the skies over the Balkan Union. Stuka divebombers, obsolete as they were, still we more than capable of knocking out Balkan tanks. Most Balkan tanks were taken out this way. Once the Germans were clearly in control of the battlefield, Zachariadis ordered a general retreat, after which, what tanks that could not be hidden were scuttled. The battle offered the last great resistance of the Red Army, and the Nationalist German forces, after the battle, continued into Greece, taking Athens.
The last holdout of active resistance in the Balkan Union was at Sofia. The city fell to the enemy on February 27, 1941. With it, the Balkan Union was under the control of Nationalist Germany. On March 1, the Balkan government officially surrendered to the Reich, thus ending the existence of the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics. Those officials attending the surrender were put under arrest and either shipped off to prison camps or shot. The Balkan Union was dismantled in short order.
Croatia, Bosnia and much of Serbia was organized into a puppet state, along with Greece. The former was slated to be colonized by Germans after the war ended, and after the area had been ethnically cleansed. “Non-Slavs”, at least by National Socialist reckoning, were organized into independent vassals. The states of Hungary, Bulgaria, Dacia and Crimea were created, and locals of a more conservative persuasion were placed in power. The states were nominally independent, and in control of internal affairs. However, these junior partners answered directly to the Nationalists.
The Fascists in command of the vassals were ultra-nationalistic in attitude, many were exiled from their homelands after the Balkan Revolution. When restored to their nations, and placed in power, they began to purge their nations of communists. The blood letting the commenced was on the same scale as post-Revolution purges. All non-nationalities within the nations were expelled, and in some cases, sent into concentration camps. The fact that, on a genetic scale, that all the Balkans had Slavic blood in them to some extent did not factor into the Nationalist’s Final Solution to the Slavic Problem.
The Camps
A large portion of Steel Helmet doctrine revolves around an anti-Slavic attitude. The Great War effectively came to an end with the Balkan Revolution, with no clear cut winner. This was one of the tools the Steel Helmet used to come to power; they claimed the Slavs betrayed them, cost them victory. At first, the solution to the Slavic Problem was to enslave many and expel the rest. Centuries before, they migrated into Europe from the East, and to the east they would be sent again. However, The East, was under Swedish control, and they had no desire to accept millions of refugees. The possibility to expel the Slavs all the way east of the Urals was discussed, but found infeasible for the immediate future. The refugee problem eventually lead to some Swedish intervention in the Balkans.
The Nationalists demanded results, and demanded them immediately. The Slavs would be removed from the land, but where would they be stored? The first concentration camp was opened north of Srebrenica, which was home to fifty thousand Slavs and other undesirables. The idea of mass extermination was not at first visited. Instead, the Slavs would be reduced to slavery, put to some use for the Germans they betrayed. To the Nationalist, that was all the “under-men” were good for. Labor camps were constructed within the boundaries of Germany, near mines and factories, where the Slavs would be used for menial labor.
A second camp was opened in Macedonia, nominally under Bulgarian control. However, the Nationalist Germans seized control of the monestrous Macedonian Tank Works, and put Slavs to use building new tanks for the Nationalists. All the industrial giants of Germany were quick to jump at the prospect of free labor. Hundreds of thousands of Slavs in labor camps across the Balkans and Germany were worked to death building weapons for the Nationalist and his henchmen.
Labor camps were just the beginning. In early 1942, a new camp was constructed five kilometers south of Srebrenica. This camp had little in the way of forced labor. The healthy and able bodied prisoners were separated from the rest. The laborers were loaned out to companies as free labor. The rest went into gas chambers. Millions of Slavs were killed in this fashion, their corpses sent into the ovens, along with other enemies of the Reich. The first people to go to the death camps were Communist Party officials, including the Revolutionary, Ivan Mestrovic. After the party leaders, came functionaries. After them, any village or town that displayed the least bit of resistance was depopulated and deported to the camps.
Operation Arctic Thunder
Heuss faced serious threats to the west, diverting him from further crusading actions against the Slavs. Though France supported the new Republic, they were not so much in favor of the invasion of the UBSR. Italy was quite the opposite, strongly supporting the elimination of the Red Menace across the Adriatic. Despite these attitudes, neither was willing to get involved in internal German affairs on a military level. This did not hold true for the United Provinces. The Dutch Commonwealth declared itself neutral in the war, though not neutral towards the Kaiser.
Heuss saw threats everywhere, and in the case of the Dutch, it was far from paranoia. The United States already made its position clear; it would overtly act to restore the Kaiser. America’s former enemies, the British, joining in this declaration. Despite their differences, the British considered the Kaiser a better deal than the Steel Helmets. With the High Seas Fleet in South America, Heuss had no chance at invading Britain. The United Provinces were another story, one that could potentially end as a springboard for the Kaiser to return to Germany.
On April 1, 1942, National Luftwaffe units began to hammer away at the cities of the United Provinces. On April 2, armored units diverted from the Balkans crossed the border. The invasion took both France and Britain by surprise, raising alarm within these countries. Paris began to wonder if it would be next. Their recognition of the German Republic saved them from invasion. The Dutch people were not so fortunate.
Following the invasion, an emergency session of the Commonwealth Assembly was called, though would be delayed by a day due to the time it would take Brazilian delegates to fly via airship to Amsterdam. Queen Juliana immediately ordered the fleet in the North Sea to move on Norway, to first stop any further invasion, and secondly to destroy the paratroopers occupying Oslo. Commonwealth ships in the North Sea came under immediate fire by U-boats, with the loss of one cruiser (traveling alone) and several other ships were damage.
Before the Commonwealth could officially declare war, some fifteen German divisions crossed the frontier. First to fall was the town of Oldenzaal, closest to the German border. The city put up no resistance and panzers simply rolled through the town continuing onward into Drenthe. The Lord of Drenthe ordered the Provincial militia to take to the field immediately. Only minutes after the first German soldier crossed the frontier, hundreds of airplanes hit serval Dutch cities, from Rotterdam to Luxembourg.
The worst hit city was that of Liege. The attack was such a surprise, that bombs were falling before either the Regent or Bishop of Liege knew the Germans crossed the border. However, the Regent did deploy some air defenses after hearing about the attacks across Norway. The meager air-defense battalion did little against German bombers. After the wave flew over, much of the city was burning, and the ancient cathedral, the same place where coronations of Kings (and Queen) took place.
By April 5, German forces entered Maastricht, sweeping aside the Provincial garrison, and by nightfall the same day, a second prong of the invasion took the ruins of Liege with little difficulty. When attempting to advance on Amsterdam on the 6th, the Hollanders breached several levies and dikes, flooding the fields and seriously impeding German advances. This did not stop a northern flanking maneuver from Drenthe, taking Harlingen and nearly cutting Amsterdam off from the North Sea.
On April 7, four days after the invasion of the low countries began, Germans surrounded Amsterdam with one thrust from the north, and another two divisions quickly bypassing the flooded fields. The Hague fell on the night of April 7, completely encircling Amsterdam, which surrendered the next day. Within five days, the northern Province fell into the control of Fuhrer Germany. As soon as the Hague fell and Amsterdam surrendered, the Germans pursued escaping Dutch officials to Middelburg in Zeeland.
It was here that the House of Oranje boarded the battleship DCS Prinz van Oranje, bound to Recife. It was a repeat of the Napoleonic War, where the Dutch royal family again were forced into exile. German generals were under orders to capture the Dutch queen and head of the Commonwealth, and this pursuit delayed actions in the southern Provinces. At 0100, on April 8, 1940, the Prinz van Oranje left port, escorted by three cruisers and eight destroyers and the (light) aircraft carrier Rotterdam.
When the Kaiser fled Germany in 1935, most of the High Seas Fleet went with him, leaving Nationalist Germany to rebuild its navy. Heuss had no carriers, one battleship and three battlecruisers, along with ten cruisers, and dozens of submarines. Only two U-Boats were in place to intercept the royal entourage, both sunk quickly by leading destroyers. The greatest threat to Juliana’s safety came from the air.
JC-13s from the Rotterdam fought off many of the German aircraft, but the light carrier could only field twenty fighters. The Luftwaffe came after them with over a hundred aircraft, though many were level bombers. And those missed the target. Dive-bombers faired worse, for they were viewed as the greatest threats. Dutch fighters downed many of them, but not without the loss of a cruiser, the DCSMaas.
A few of the German bombers flew low, equipped with torpedoes. Two torpedoes sunk a destroyer, and three more were dead on for the Prinz van Oranje. One torpedo hit the ship at the bow, but proved to be a dud. A second missed, but the third proved to be quite live. The third torpedo was intercepted by the destroyer Trident, which passed in front of the torpedo, taking the hit for the Queen. The ship was struck amidship, split in half and sank quickly. Only seven survivors made it to British shore.
While the royal family made its escape, fighting continued in the southern Provinces. Luxembourg was overwhelmed on April 5. Namur fell on April 7, and those German divisions linked with the force out of Luxembourg, and continued into France along with several divisions that entered the Duchy of Luxembourg after the city fell. All of the United Provinces were under German control by April 10, with the exception of Brussels.
Commonwealth and German forces fought fiercely around the city. No matter the valor of the Commonwealth soldiers, the Germans were slowly pushing them back into the besieged city. Germans spared little in the way of artillery and aircraft to neutralize Brussels; the bulk of their forces storming through France. The people of Brussels suffered greatly during the siege and latter during occupation. During the siege, every able-bodied Netherlander in the city pitched in to help in the defense, from building breastworks to cooking for the soldiers. No matter its defiance, Brussels fell seventeen days after the invasion started, on April 22.
Provinces under Nationalist control suffered the most severe crackdown on liberty since the nation’s founding, over three centuries previous. Newspapers were shutdown, radio stations placed under the control of the German Army. Military governors were placed in power over each Province. Most of the Provincial rulers went into exile with the rest of the Staaten-General and the Queen. Only the Countess of Artois missed the boat. Countess Jeanette had the means to escape, but refused to leave while her subject suffered under the Nationalist occupation. For her troubles, the Germans placed the Countess under house arrest, and General von Beck attempted to rule the County of Artois in her name. The Artoisers did not buy the farce.
Occupational authorities heavily rationed goods that the Dutch people long since took for granted. Sugar and coffee were confiscated for use by the Germans, leaving little to none for Netherlanders. At first there was protest, for it was a long standing Dutch tradition to speak out at perceived injustices. For their troubles, the occupying authorities threw them into the one of many detention centers erected around the Provinces.
At first, the resistance did everything it possibly could to make the occupation force’s stay in the United Provinces as difficult as possible. Some actions were of downright defiance to the Germans, such as on the night of February 5, 1943, some brazen Netherlanders managed to infiltrate a German airbase near Lier, steal sugar from the pilot’s mess, dump it into the fuel tanks of the pilot’s planes, and just to make absolutely certain the Germans knew who was responsible, the perpetrators rose the orange-white-and-blue banner of the United Provinces over the airfield. Needless to say, those Germans responsible for security that night were severely punished.
Any and all attempts at normalcy the Dutch people attempted to create failed. Netherlanders continued to tend the fields and work the factories. The United Provinces faced a partial economic collapse during the Occupation Years. Many foreign speculators who made fortunes on the Amsterdam Stock Market, sold off their shares and commodities the day Germany launched its attack. When they fled the United Provinces, they took with them the largest single-day transfer of wealth in Dutch history. Companies were ruined and the banks of Amsterdam faced a run.
The Bank of Amsterdam, a bank that weathered centuries of economic ups and downs, would sooner face a world-wide depression than what the Germans did to that institution. To fund the German war machine, Heuss ordered the banks plundered, billions of guilders in gold and silver were stripped from the financial capital of the world and shipped east across the Wesser. The Nationalist Government did not stop with the banks, cultural artifacts were pillaged, including some of the greatest works of Van Gogh.
For a nation that long since depended upon trade for its survival, German occupation of the ports and harbors found many traders and merchants instantly out of work. Larger traders, with offices in other Commonwealth states, would survive the occupation, but the small, individual trader, a long standing Dutch tradition, was wiped out before New Year’s of 1943. Many factories were taken under the control of occupational authorities, and put to use for the German war effort. Many loyal Netherlanders quit rather than build bullets and bombs for the enemy.
Despite the nationalistic spirit of the Dutch people, so strong it drove many to go hungry rather than assist conquerors, the Netherlands faced the same bane as all occupied nations; collaboration. When not harassing the Germans, the Resistance targeted any and all that overtly aided the Germans. Workers in factories were spared the retaliation, for there were still families than needed feeding, but those who worked with and for the Gestapo were often found in the morning, quite dead.
Though many individuals would rise up against the occupiers, the Resistance did its best to keep a low profile. It specialized in both sabotaging the enemy, and aiding fellow Netherlanders left unemployed and destitute by the occupation. It was not until the middle of 1944, that the Dutch Resistance rose up against the occupiers.
Resistance
Even before the mass murder of the Slavs, Balkans resisted German occupation and the puppet vassals. The International Brotherhood of Workers melted away into the crowd after the Balkan Union fell. Most of these were part of the original Revolutionary cells back in 1916. New cells were formed. However, these cells were not all communistic in nature. Many cells drifted towards the inherit nationalism that plagues the Balkans. These cells attacked their neighbors just as readily as they attacked the occupiers.
Chief among the resistance leaders was Joseph Tito. Born in Kunrovec, Croatia in 1892, Tito participated in the Balkan Uprisings. He was a young officer in the Croatian Socialist Army, serving under Trumbic during the capture of Zagreb. He spent the immediate years after the formation of the Balkan Union as a party official in the Croatian Soviet. During the Trumbic Years, he was elevated to the Supreme Soviet of the Union, as were many of Trumbic’s fellow Croatians. He was part of Croatia’s representation during every Party Congress between 1936-1940. When Nationalist Germany invaded the Balkan Union, Tito melted away into the Croatian countryside, along with units of the broken Red Army.
Tito’s partisans began their attacks against the occupiers in mid 1941. Their raids were minor at first; small unit patrols vanishing, road side bombs knocking out trucks, even one stunt were a partisan smuggled a fine, itchy powder into a laundry frequented by the Germans. Tito’s campaign picked up in pace when his partisans assassinated Nationalist strongman Reinhard Heydrick in Split, on August 4, 1943. In retaliation, the Steel Helmets deported more than sixty percent of the city’s population to camps scattered across the Balkans.
His reign of terror did succeed in dragging more soldiers into the Balkans to pacify the region, soldiers that could be headed for the Eastern Front. Partisans were some of the first outside of the Steel Helmets to learn of the existence of the camps. Once it became clear that his countrymen were being butchered by the thousands, Tito ordered general attacks against any and all Steel Helmet personnel. Any Helmet man captured would be swiftly executed. He shifted his attacks away from the German Army and on to servants of the Nationalist.
The greatest blow against the Slavic Genocide came on May 18, 1944, when Tito personally lead a raid against a train stuffed full of Croats and Bosniaks destined for Sarejavo. More than five thousand people were crammed into a couple dozen cattle cars. Many died during the escape, but the surviving adults were recruited into Tito’s army. Again, the Helmets retaliated for this attack. They massacred four thousand men, women and children outside of Sarejavo, dumping their corpses into a pit and setting it ablaze.
Aside from Marshall Tito, another of the old guard lead resistance, Zoltan Tildy. Instead of fighting Nationalist Germany directly, he remained in his homeland of Hungary, and did battle with the vassal government installed by the Nationalist. Tildy’s campaign did not have the magnitude of bloodshed that Tito knew, but he did prove successful in throwing a monkey wrench into the Hungarians works. His raid on the Hungarian Air Force’s Szolnok, and destruction of numerous fighters warranted this comment from an analysis in the RAF; “Monkey wrench nothing, Tildy threw the whole monkey into the work.”
Reprisals within the Hungarian state were nowhere near as brutal as within territories directly occupied by Nationalist Germany. In truth, the Hungarian Secret Police were amateurs when compared to the Helmet’s security apparatus. Many were quietly sympathetic with the resistance. There were no longer any overt communists within Hungary’s government. Like in the occupied territories, the vassals also purged themselves of I.B.W. members, handing them over to Nationalist Germany, as per the one-sided treaties the Nationalist forced upon his vassals.
War against Japan
A month after the Germans launched their assault against the United Provinces, the resource-starved Japanese moved against Indonesia. In order to secure a supply line to the oil rich islands, they first landed soldiers on Formosa and Hainan. With millions of soldiers already based in .China, the Japanese had a nearly inexhaustible invasion force after they won control of the Strait of Taiwan. The bulk of the Commonwealth Pacific fleet was based around Java, and the few ships in Formosa were sunk or disabled while still in port.
Commonwealth forces only numbered some five divisions on the island, far more than the initial invasion. However, with control of the seas and air, the Japanese continued to funnel reinforcements and supplies. Formosa held out far longer than the United Provinces, Taipei, the final holdout, surrendering on September 8. Hainan faired worse, surrendering after three weeks of heavy fighting. On both islands, the Japanese attempted to present themselves as liberators.
But liberators to what? Japan said ‘Asia for the Asians’, but the Chinese on both islands long since considered themselves Dutch. They spoke the Dutch language, adopted Dutch personal names, and knew nothing but Dutch liberty for centuries. For being liberators, the Japanese were quick to suppress any dissent on the island. When the Formosans attempted to protest Japanese policy on food rationing, the crowds were met not with reassurances but the rattle of machine guns.
The Japanese Navy and Army were very divided, so much so that it was a wonder they advanced as far and as fast as they did. With the Army gaining much glory, the Navy set out to best them. The Japanese Navy sought out and found the Commonwealth fleet in the Java Sea. In what would be the first case of naval warfare without ships actually seeing each other, Japanese carriers launched an attack against the Commonwealth.
By September of 1942, the Dutch Commonwealth was facing defeat in the East Indies. The Japanese were already in control of the ports on Sumatra and Borneo, and sought to add Java to their Empire, along with the oil fields of the East Indies. The Japanese had spent the previous month pounding away at airfields on Java, and managed to destroy the dry dock facilities in Jakarta. The Commonwealth Navy in that part of the world was not as high as in the Atlantic, where the bulk of the Commonwealth Navy was massed in Brazil, participating in the Battle of the Atlantic. Limited Commonwealth Naval forces were divided between Ceylon and Jakarta, the forces on Formosa being destroyed in 1942.
The Commonwealth fleet, under the command of Admiral Karl Doorman, with his flag on the DCS William IV. Accompanying him, the battlecruiser Tanhausen, the carrier Delft, along with cruisersJava, Delphi, and Flores and five destroyers. Commonwealth carrier doctrine stress air cover over the fleet to allow the big guns to enter range of the enemy. As such, the Delft carried fighters and scout planes, and had no ability to project its power beyond the horizon. This tactic proved effective against Nationalist Germany, but only because their navy was shriveled since the bulk of the German Imperial Navy supports the Kaiser.
The Japanese Navy, on the other hand, utilized air power in ways that European and American navies had not considered. The Japanese used carrier-based air craft in attacks on Formosa and British Luzon. The British Far East fleet was destroyed in Manilla Bay by the Japanese Navy. The Japanese fleet, under the command of Admiral Takeo Takagi, from his flagship the Hiryu. Hiryu was accompanied by the carrier Soryu, along with battleship Yamashiro, cruisers Tone and Takeo along with five destroyers. Behind this fleet was the invasion force of one carrier, four battleships, seven cruisers and a mess of destroyers, along with twelve thousand soldiers.
The Commonwealth fleet maneuvered along the north shore of Java, never moving one hundred kilometers away from the shore, and its additional air cover. The Japanese fleet moved down the Makassar Strait, into attack range on September 16, 1942. At 0500, both Japanese carriers launched a risky night-time attack against the Commonwealth fleet. The fighters and bombers would have returned long after sunrise. Accompanying the attack, two hundred Japanese medium bombers took off from bases on Borneo, and struck diversionary attacks at airbases surrounding Jakarta, cratering the runways. Additional air strikes severely damaged the port, making it virtually impossible, or at the very least impractical for the fleet to make call. It is not known precisely, but is believed that Doorman considered this the main attack of the day, and he ordered half of his fighters to intercept the Betty bombers.
At 0820, the first wave of 10 Japanese torpedo bombers struck at the Commonwealth fleet. Three were downed by anti-aircraft fire, and four more by the remaining air cover. However, the torpedo bombers drew the too few fighters down low, while Japanese dive bombers struck at the fleet. At 0826, the first of the Vals struck the Delft. Minutes later, bombs struck the DCS Tanhausen, knocking out its forward turret. A second attack from above hit the Delft at 0831. This strike knocked out the carrier’s elevators and destroyed the bridge superstructure. A second wave of torpedo bombers homed in on the carrier at 0837, destroying its rudder and rupturing its bow. The end of the Delft did not occur until 0903, after the first Japanese attack had departed, when fires raging through the carrier engulfed an armory, setting off numerous one hundred millimeter anti-aircraft artillery. At 0910, the surviving senior officer ordered abandon ship. A destroyer running along side the carrier during the battle also sunk, as result of taking two torpedoes intended for the Delft.
Doorman now had no choice but to retreat closer to Java, and hope that it had enough fighters to provide air cover. Two destroyers broke from his fleet to rescue survivors of the doomed carrier, while the rest of the fleet steamed towards the southwest. The few fighters that Java managed to get airborne, were outclassed by the Zeros when the second attack arrived at 1411. While the Commonwealth fighters were picked off by the zeros, Kate torpedo bomber homed in on the King William IV, while Vals attacked the battlecruiser. The damaged Tanhausen was hit by four more bombs, the last of which penetrated the aft deck and into the magazine. With one tremendous explosion, the Tanhausen broke two-thirds of the way to its stern at 1418. The rest of the ship sank within ten minutes, with most of the crew on board.
At 1422, torpedoes ripped open the starboard hull of the King William IV, causing the battleship to list severely. Java exploded in a giant fire ball at 1426, and Delphi was crippled by repeated attacks. The Japanese ended their attack at 1431, with two additional destroyers on fire, and the King William IV further damaged by addition bombs. Admiral Doorman was killed during the last bombing run, when the bridge was strafe, and then toppled by a bomb impact below it. The King William IV capsized at 1541. By night fall, when it was clear no further attack was on its way, Captain Hans Vermen of the DCS Flores took command of the fleet, and ordered the survivors of the disastrous battle to be retrieved by night fall. Following sunset, the remainder of the fleet limped eastwards towards Ceylon, since Jakarta’s port facilities were no longer able to take on the ships.
The Battle of the Java Sea was the first naval battle in history were the fleets never actually saw each other. The battle also shattered Commonwealth carrier doctrine, and propelled the Commonwealth to design and produce its own carrier-based bombers and attackers. The battle also allowed the Japanese to land on Java, and occupy Jakarta. Like the other major islands of the archipelago, the Japanese were easily able to control the cities and oil fields, but failed to pacify the rest of the island, though not from lack of effort. The Commonwealth Navy was out of the East Indies for the better part of a year, until the first of the Ernst van Bohr class carriers were launched. Commonwealth ground forces did not return to the islands until 1944.
As bad as life under enemy occupation was for Netherlanders, it was far worse for Formosans and Javans. The Principality of Java was never fully subjugated by the Japanese. Though they occupied ports, airfields and coastal area, but never the interior. They were only interested in controlling the island and seas around it, for the even larger oil fields of Sumatra and especially Borneo. Though Japan would continue to proclaim Asia for the Asians, they simply could not spare the resources to bring Java into full compliance, at least not while fighting multiple enemies on multiple fronts.
Formosa, however, was another story. As was stated earlier, when the Formosans attempted to protest the Japanese the same way they would the Commonwealth, the Japanese replied with the rat-tat of machine guns. That was just the start. To the Dutch, race meant little, but to the Japanese it meant everything. Those ‘racially’ European, were interned in camps across the island. However, after centuries, and mostly Dutch male colonization, there was little that could be called ‘white’. What the Japanese did not understand was that ‘race is skin-deep, but nations go to the heart’. The racially Asian, i.e. those whose ancestors came from southern China, considered themselves Formosans, and ‘as Dutch as the next man’.
While the Europeans were interned, the Japanese, claiming to liberate the Chinese, repressed them with the same vigor as they did on mainland Asia. Japanese nationalism in turn sparked Dutch nationalism for all the islanders. The love of nation was so strong, that one monk gave up obtaining Nirvana this lifetime for the sake of his country. Like most Buddhist monks, Singhanda Mantama attempted to resist Japanese occupation through non-violent means, including civil disobedience. The Japanese would crush any and all disobedience, and further retaliate by destroying several Theravada temples, along with Catholic and Protestant churches.
Born in India, Mantama, like most Indians, was at first suspicious of the Dutch. Unlike Ceylon, Java and Formosa, who were made Dutch over the course of centuries of colonization and assimilation, India was conquered in a relatively short time. Aside from southern India, which was inherited from Portugal following United Provinces’ independence, the rest of the subcontinent was brought under Dutch rule by military force between 1783 to the 1870s. Some Indian states allied themselves with the Dutch, and thus kept their own languages and cultures (though Commonwealth culture would slowly filter in). The states brought into compliance by force, in turn had the Dutch language, law and customs forced upon them. This odd arrangement makes India the most cosmopolitan of Commonwealth states, and the most prone to instability.
Mantama grew up in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. Even as recent as the 1930s, when Mantama left India for Formosa, India was still backwards compared to the rest of the Commonwealth. Because of its diversity, India was always the slowest Dutch nation to adapt. Industrialization, which occurred in the United Provinces, Brazil and Formosa during the Nineteenth Century, is still occurring in India of the Twenty-first Century. However, Mantama did not leave in search of a better life, but in search of Enlightenment.
His quest for Enlightenment came to an end when Japanese bombs began to rain near his monastery in 1940. His, along with the Formosans’ world, was turned upside down when the Japanese overran the island, and forced the Commonwealth surrender. Though the politicians surrendered, many of the Commonwealth soldiers went to ground and fled to the hills, to continue to fight against the occupiers. However, unlike the Germans, the Japanese were not about to tolerate any dissent.
When one of Mantama’s fellow monks went to the Japanese authorities in protest over the seizure of rice from farmers without compensation, the Japanese guards ran him through with bayonets. Monks that tried to block traffic with their bodies were simply ran over. Another, refusing to bow to ‘savages’ was beaten to death by a Japanese patrol. It was these events that forced other monks to realize they would have to fight back with force.
Knowing he could not stop the violence, Mantama endeavored to control and direct the violence. His strategies in luring Japanese patrols into traps and minimizing Dutch deaths, improved his own standing within the resistance. By 1943, Mantama was effectively the head of the Dutch Resistance on Formosa. With each ambush, the Japanese were forced to increase size of patrols, until entire platoons were patrolling the streets of Taipei and New Antwerp.
Killing of Japanese soldiers did not go without reprisal. The Japanese resorted to random executions, adding that to policies of forced labor, reeducation, so-called comfort girls and genocide. Each murder in the sake of retaliation weighed heavily on Mantama. Perhaps it was his consciousness, but Mantama never made a decision lightly. He would prefer to have no killings at all. His reluctance brought much criticism against him by the more radical resistance cells. They wondered why should they not strike at the enemy. Nobody asked the Japanese to come to Formosa, they just forced their way in, and it was the resistance’s job to drive them out.
It was not until the dawn of 1945, when a Commonwealth invasion loomed over the horizon did Mantama unleash the resistance upon the Japanese. As soon as bombs fell and smoke cleared, the resistance slipped into damaged barracks to slit the throats of any surviving Japanese. Nor was it until Commonwealth soldiers set foot on Formosa did the resistance wheel out artillery and a few tanks hidden away in the hills. If not for Mantama’s temperance, various resistance cells might have piddled away resources until they had nothing to face the occupiers on the day of liberation.
Liberation
In October of 1944, War Plan Tulip unfolded as the Commonwealth landed an invasion force in Zeeland, north of Middelburg. Middelburg was not the first choice of cities to be liberated, but Queen Juliana insisted the invasion plans be changed. It was the port she left her homeland years before, and she wished it to be the first city to be free, and the port of her re-entry.
Germany did not anticipate an invasion of northern Europe so early. By the middle of November, Zeeland was all but liberated, and Commonwealth forces were now on both sides of the mouth of the Rhine. Any hope of keeping the Dutch, or any other ally, on the far side of the river. Bridges across the Rhine soon became the heaviest fortified positions in all of Europe.
Nationalist Germany managed to hold this line until April of 1945, when the Commonwealth provided a breakout along the Rhine. The Hague was cleared of occupational forces on May 7, 1945, with Delft liberated one day later. Whilst be forced from Amsterdam, the Germans attempted to breach levies and dikes all along the Holland coast. Only two breaches occurred, and those were patched within a week. The Queen condemned the actions of the Nationalist German government, but as she and the world would soon learn, these were far from the most heinous crimes of the Nationalist regime,
The liberation of the Balkans began in August of 1944, with the Swedish invasion of Crimea. Sweden brought itself into the war for the sake of humanitarian reasons, for it was the Red Cross that informed the King of the genocide, as well as to remove the Nationalist Germans from the Balkans. Though Sweden had no love for the Kaiser, they preferred him vastly over the rapidly destabilizing Heuss. Leading the drive into Crimea were Sweden’s legendary armored cavalry, the Cossacks. The Crimean vassal lasted only twenty-three days against the Swedish invasion, before capitulating. On the twenty-first day, when victory was all but assured, the Crimean people rose up in a spontaneous rebellion, ousting the hated puppet dictator. The leader of this Fascists state, Revik Gzorny, was lynched in the courtyard of the People’s Court in Sevastopol. Though Crimea fell easily, the Nationalist German Army constructed elaborate fortification across Dacia.
Bulgaria was the next vassal to fall. On January 17, 1945, the government in Sofia fell, and was replaced by the Bulgarian Socialist Party. On January 20, the Bulgarian Balkan Socialist Republic joined the Swedes in their drive through the Balkans. Greek partisans joined the Bulgarians in liberated Constantinople from the Nationalist’s grasp. Closing the Bosporus effectively cut off any pockets of German resistance along the Black Sea.
By April of 1945, the Red Army came out of hiding in force. Before, they were but partisans, bloodying the Nationalist wherever possible. With Swedish forces grinding through the Balkans, the Red Army retrieved all the heavy equipment if had cached away, including more than two hundred surviving tanks. The Red Army struck south through Greece, and met German armor in what could only be called a reverse battle of Thermopylae. It was the Greeks who charged into the now widened pass, breaking the garrison and driving on Athens. No front line soldiers of the Reich were based within Greece since the fall of the Balkan Union. This fact was what allowed the reborn Red Army to achieve victory.
By June of 1945, the Swedish Army crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania, at the time occupied by Hungary. With the Swedish Army rolling over the Nationalist’s Hungarian vassals, the Hungarian people seized the moment and rose up against the installed government. Tildy lead his partisans in the most overt action of his carrier as a guerilla; a full scale assault on Budapest. His attack was premature, and broken by the Germans garrisoned in the city.
Though the attack on the capital failed, the general uprising succeeded in taking control of the countryside, while the Hungarian nationalists remained in command of the major cities. Partisans hit each convoy that ventured between cities, massacring the soldiers and looting their supplies. City by city fell to Swedish sieges, unable to resupply do to partisan activity. Tildy linked up with the 55th Kiev Infantry and 5th Cossack Armored Cavalry south of Budapest, and attempted to take the city again in late September. Though the Hungarians fought fiercely to take back their capital along side the Swedes and the Cossacks, it was not Tildy who accepted the surrender of the German garrison on October 3. It was Ivan Drenekovich, commander of the 5th Cossacks.
Liberating the Camps
The true horror of the crusades, was not on the battlefields, were over ten million soldiers were killed. It was not even in the cities across Europe where tens million were killed in sieges and air raids. It was in the concentration and death camps scattered across Eastern Europe. When soldiers go into combat, they accept the fact they could die. When civilians die during the battle, they are collateral damage. When they were placed in the camps, it was murder on an industrial scale.
The first camps liberated were a shock to the Swedish Army. Tens of thousands of emaciated inmates, tens of thousands more dead.. Two more months fighting in the Balkans, and a dozen more camps were liberated. Swedish officials carefully documented the camps and captured Steel Helmet documents. The Helmets were methodical about keeping records. Executed inmates were written down with inhuman accuracy. The job was too big for the Swedish Army to handle alone. The Red Cross rushed to the Balkans in the wake of Swedish advances, attempting to save those who were not beyond hope. It is estimated that nearly seven million Slavs were killed in the camps.
When partisans and remnants of the Red Army liberated their first camp, the Balkans no longer gave quarter to the Nationalist’s henchmen. Any soldier, whether regular army or Steel Helmet paramilitary, were killed on sight. The Balkans took out revenge upon the Nationalist Germans. A contingent of Serbian partisans, under the command of General Stephan Filipovic, launched their own attack against a Swedish ran POW camp. The Swedish guards stood back helpless, as eight thousand Serbs slaughtered every prisoner in the camp.
Most Balkan units and partisans remained in the Balkans, hunting down German holdouts and collaborators. Filipovic’s Brigade followed the Swedish Army northwest, raiding into Austria and Bohemia, taking their revenge to the German people. On the march north, the Swedes liberated more camps, this time labor camps. Hundreds of thousands more Balkans were liberated from these camps. Freeing the prisoners slowed the Swedish Army’s advance, but the fate of Nationalist Germany was sealed by 1946. It was the Cossacks who spearheaded the final thrust into the heart of the Reich.
It is said that when the Kaiser returned to his palace in Berlin, and saw the city in ruins, he fell to his knees and wept. For all the devastation in Europe, one can not forget that at the core of the conflict was a German civil war. For years, German fought fellow German, all of them subjects of the Kaiser. So many of his people died in the conflict, and so much stress ate away at the Kaiser’s health, that he died just over a year after the war’s end.