Shattered World - A Worse World War : Segment 46.3

August 16^th  1948 to August 25^th 1948

 

 

In Arbil, northern Iraq, trains have been arriving in unusually large numbers for the past two weeks. Hidden safely under tarps on flat beds to avoid the prying eyes of high-flying German recon jets, sit American-made Goddard V ballistic missiles and the equipment to support them. Even the local Kurdish leadership doesn’t know what the surge of trains is bringing. With a maximum range of some 450 miles the oil fields at Baku are barely within range. And, from launching points in southeastern Britain, northwestern Germany is also in range. Britain, with some help from the U.S., is about to unleash a surprise for Germany.

 

 

After two weeks of headlong retreat, the Free French are ready to make a stand. Having marshaled all available remaining troops, some 100,000 in all, Charles De Gaulle has drawn a line 30 kilometers east of Algiers. And Rommel’s streaking panzer and mechanized divisions have arrived. The Free French have more artillery, more men, and much shorter supply lines. The Germans have more armor, more mobility in general, and air superiority. Perhaps more importantly, the Germans have the Desert Viper. And the Viper strikes hard, sending his best panzer division directly into the Free French center while panzergrenadier divisions sweep southwest to flank the Free French lines. The Free French are ready for such an attack, and well entrenched troops equipped with American bazookas and recoilless rifles slow down the panzers while Free French artillery hammers at less protected German infantry.

In the early afternoon hours, just as the Free French seem poised to bring Rommel’s advance to a halt, Rommel springs a trap that has been three years in the making. An Italian paratrooper battalion, formed in 1945, has been training hard ever since for a very special mission. A decapitation strike on Charles de Gaulle. Rommel was informed of the battalion’s existence and its purpose only three weeks before. The timing could not have been better. Rommel knows exactly how to use this paratrooper battalion and quickly dismisses Mussolini’s elaborate plan to use them to kidnap De Gaulle. Rommel has something more practical in mind.

French Desert Patrol

At precisely 2:30 PM, after an hour of heavy bombardment by German and Italian aircraft,  2000 elite Italian paratroopers armed with the best light weapons and equipment in the Axis arsenal drop from Luftwaffe transport planes and land in the Free French rear – west of Algiers. By 4:00 they have taken up strong defensive positions, thoroughly blocking the coastal roads and rail lines heading west towards Oran. Meanwhile, Rommel’s strong southwestern flanking attack is now due south of Algiers. Charles De Gaulle and much of the Free French government, the entire remaining Free French army, and the city of Algiers, have nearly been pocketed.

Italian Paradrop

  

   Far to the east, the story is different. Guderian’s lines in Libya are beginning to buckle under the tremendous weight of British firepower being thrown at him. With his lines west of Gazala beginning to waver, Guderian decides to fall back to his secondary line of defense. This line, anchored on Mekili in the south and Derna along the coast to the north, is the last significant defensive line east of Benghazi. As the air war rages on, the best German and Italian infantry divisions in the theatre begin assuming strong screening positions as the rest of the Axis army begins to move west. British bombing has disabled the Libyan rail net between Benghazi and Derna to such an extent that the Axis forces are moving purely by road.

 

 

With three bridgeheads now fully secured on western Formosa and marines probing inland in all directions, the U.S. high command has decided on a target for the second atomic bomb at their immediate disposal. After a series of massive fighter sweeps clear the skies over northern Formosa,  a U.S. B-31 bomber drops a 20 kiloton atomic bomb over a section of the Japanese defensive line west of Taipei. The Japanese, expecting an atomic strike somewhere along the line, execute a new strategy of “flexible defense”. The defense lines west of Taipei have great depth but are relatively dispersed at any given point.

Blasted Sherman

The atomic bomb missed the massive concrete bunker it was aiming for and instead landed nearly a mile north amidst widely dispersed Japanese trench lines. Immediately after the atomic explosion the Japanese begin lobbing conventional and chemical artillery into the area west of the atomic strike – catching the massing U.S. forces there by surprise. Despite the Japanese bombardment the U.S. attack begins on time and tears through the area devastated by the atomic blast. However, an hour after the atomic strike Japanese infantry have already moved to bolster the remaining lines of defense east of the blast zone. In the end, the atomic attack gains the U.S. army and marines about four miles of easy advance before they once again run into strong Japanese defenses.

 

Charles De Gaulle organizes a Free French counter-attack against the Italian paratroopers blocking the roads and rails to the west of Algiers. The Free French have little remaining mechanized capability and their air force has been destroyed over the course of the last few weeks of heavy fighting over Algeria. The Italian paratroopers west of Algiers hold their positions with the help of Italian and Luftwaffe air support. Having exhausted his last offensive capabilities De Gaulle settles in for a stubborn defense – the siege of Algiers has begun.

De Gaulle finished?

In London, the British decide at last that they must commit precious resources to save the Free French position in North Africa. Several divisions of ANZAC and Canadian infantry are to be transferred to Northwest Africa. However, getting them there will take time and the Free French position is unraveling rapidly. Churchill calls his commanders in Libya to encourage them to press the offensive forward with all possible vigor in the hopes that pressure there will bring Rommel’s invasion of Algeria to a grinding halt.

British Centurions

 

 

 

After several weeks of delay Germany unleashes its titanic retaliatory campaign against the Soviet Union in response to the Soviet’s use of a crop-busting biological attack. The attack begins in the early morning hours as 150 Ju-588 long range heavy bombers attack the Soviet city of Omsk, far to the east of the Ural mountains. The bombers, the first operational Ju-588’s fielded by the Luftwaffe, fly largely unmolested across Kazakhstan and drop a mix of conventional, incendiary, nerve gas, and mustard gas munitions on the city’s industrial districts and heavily populated residential neighborhoods. The city’s tank and aircraft factories suffer moderate damage – the city’s civilian population suffers much, much worse. Swollen with new factory workers and largely lacking in civil defense procedures or air defenses, the city is entirely unprepared for the German onslaught. Some 100,000 civilians are killed in the nightmarish inferno of flames and chemical death; tens of thousands more are wounded. This begins what will become a sustained conventional and chemical bombing campaign against important trans-ural Soviet cities. Only eight of the new German bombers are lost in the first attack. Losses will rise in the future as the Soviets improve their air defenses in the trans-ural regions.

   The second aspect of the German retaliatory campaign is a rain of ballistic missiles, armed with nerve gas warheads, upon many of the cities of European Russia. The latest mass-produced model of the German A4 missile has a range of nearly 1600 kilometers and a 3500 pound warhead. Hundreds of these missiles hit Leningrad, Moscow, Beriagrad, and other major Russian cities west of the Urals. Inaccuracy of the missiles, winds, and excellent civil defense preparations in the European Russian cities themselves(including chemical-rated bomb shelters, chemical warfare masks for the general population, etc.), combine  to limit the deaths to a combined total of some twenty thousand killed and twice that number wounded. Although the losses from the German chemical ballistic missiles are relatively light(and will get lighter as civil defense procedures further improve) – the constant threat of the German ‘gas missiles’ will none-the-less exact a huge psychological toll upon the people of European Russia.

As German missiles and bombers rain chemical and conventional death across the Soviet Union – German radio and TV broadcasts boast of the powerful attacks, with Goebbels publicly describing the campaign as “righteous vengeance against the sub-human Bolshevik’s attempt to starve all of Europe”. Germany publicly acknowledges its fight to prevent the spread of a virulent wheat blight in central and eastern Europe and presents evidence through diplomatic back channels which strongly implicates the Soviets in its emergence. The Soviets, of course, strongly deny the German claims and rail against the “NAZI genocide upon the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union”.

Joeseph Goebbels

   Germany, a latecomer in the area of biological warfare, will soon redouble its efforts to catch up in this field.

 

 

The RAF mounts its first large scale bombing raid on Turkey, with 500 British Lancaster and B-31 bombers hitting the Turkish capitol of Ankara. A powerful force of escorting British fighters sweeps aside the Turkish air force. The center of Ankara is devastated and many of the city’s government buildings are destroyed , including the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish parliament building, and many other government offices. 55,000 Turkish civilians are killed in the bombing and its resulting firestorm. Britain urges Turkey to leave the Axis Powers if it “wishes to avoid further rains of destruction”. In Turkey there will soon be much resentment against the Germans due to the Luftwaffe’s failure to aid in the air defenses over central Turkey. However, this resentment pales against the anger directed at the British.

Target: Ankara!

 

 

The german Armada

In central Poland, over five hundred hastily assembled German helicopters engage in the largest ever massed helicopter training operation. Otto Skorzeny is training the men of the 1st SS paratrooper division for a very special mission.

 

 

Germany launches operation ‘Pillar’, a complex combined-arms operation designed to end the siege of Gibraltar once and for all. Ten massive rail guns have been brought forward to shell Gibraltar on a sustained basis and the Kriegsmarine has re-deployed many of its older submarines, supported by additional Sea Ural long-range naval recon planes, to tighten the submarine net around Gibraltar and prevent the occasional British re-supply attempts. In addition, the fledgling Spanish air force and newly arrived Iberian squadrons of the Luftwaffe will intensify bombing operations. The operation is designed to culminate in a direct assault by conventional and special forces but this will not take place until the new siege efforts have further degraded the Rock’s defenses.

The "Beast"

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED…