The Guns of August
Introduction
The first days of the Great War swept over Europe with an air of excitement. After years of tension and buildup, many responded to the declaration with relief that the waiting was finally over. In those brief days of optimism, the great cities of the world hummed with energy and celebration. Lounges and bars were full from St. Petersburg to Marseille. Meanwhile, the first preemptive actions were taken, and general mobilization began. The Guns of August would come to bear soon enough.
Mobilization
The Orders Come Down
On Saturday, August 13th, 1938, General Mobilization was declared across The Holy Roman Empire. The announcement was made across radio and television channels at noon. By that evening, posters had appeared in every city center in the empire, and personnel began flooding in.
The Empire had come to rely on the idea that their professional soldiers were their most important formation, and so had spent lavish amounts on the training and equipment of the Imperial Landwehr. This produced a number of excellent units; however, their numbers were very low comparatively. This focus on quality resulted in a rapidly increasing military budget throughout the early 1900s; however, little of this was spent on the reserves. At the beginning of the Great War, the Imperial Landwehr consisted of forty-three divisions or roughly half a million men-at-arms. In the event of war, these were to be bolstered by a large number of reserve divisions. Imperial law had not been favorable to conscription, as many member states resisted increasingly centralized authority. Because of this resistance, each year only 0.19% of the Empire’s population entered the reserves. Conscripts only aged out of service at the age of 45, so this still provided a backlog of trained soldiers of close to 30 million men.
In the first phase of mobilization, five million men were called to service, mostly comprising units from the border states. This followed the requirements for Plan F+I, developed by Field Marshal Alfred Jansa, in which the Empire was placed under attack by both the French and Italian Republics at once. The plan called for deployment along the Rhine and the Po River following a defensive stance, and for large concentrations of men and materiel in designated “Festung Cities” along the lines. Once the initial enemy attack was stalled, reserve units formed into three different army groups would launch a counter-offensive to retake lost territory and drive towards critical cities.
Levée en masse
The revolutionary embers of The New French Republic were not dimmed by the Paris Massacre, but instead were fanned into a great roaring flame. In the days that followed a great restlessness took hold, as if no one in the whole nation could sleep. Streets were full into the late hours of the night, and zeppelin traffic clogged the air. The moment of realization had finally come, all citizens must choose a side, and the majority chose Liberation. Red was the color of the day, and the youth loudly vied with each other for the title of “most socialist” on every street corner and in every club.
The principal strategy of the former French Empire had been that of the “Levée en masse.” Large amounts of citizen-soldiers would be called up in the event of war to defend their homeland. In stark contrast to the policies of The Holy Roman Empire, nearly a full percent of the population entered the reserves every year, giving the New Republic a vast pool of manpower to draw upon. After the official declaration of General Mobilization, following the dictates of Plan XXIII, eight and a half million men were called to service from the reserves. These were to be formed into five field armies that would attack aggressively along the Rhine, with the greatest concentrations focused on Rotterdam and Frankfurt.
By the time mobilization was officially ordered, nearly a third of the soldiers comprising the first wave had already assembled themselves at their mustering points. However, while enthusiasm was high, the forming Grande Armée had a number of critical problems. With the constant political bickering of the last decade, military spending had been a deep point of contention. Stockpiles of uniforms and weaponry were perilously thin, and many soldiers had to resort to purchasing their own equipment. More dire though was the serious lack of mechanization. With the scale of the coming conflict, there simply weren’t enough trucks to go around. The government of the New Republic responded to this crisis by issuing a bill immediately nationalizing all industries deemed “war critical.” This nationalization ranged from automotive factories to textile mills. In a speech given on the 15th of August, Minister of War André Le Troquer stated “The coming fight is unlike any we have ever seen. This is a war for the soul of France, and the soul of the working class around the world. We must be committed to victory in its totality.”
The Prince-Imperial
The upper echelon of the French military had long been a bastion of Bonapartist support, and with the rise of the Liberation Party this had become even more evident. Steps had been taken to alleviate this divided loyalty, but after the execution of Napoleon V it became obvious that reconciliation was impossible. On August 1st a train was seized near Tours by a group of Bonapartist officers and their household guard. They were intercepted by a commissariat task force near Angoulême. This resulted in a vicious gunfight in which the royalists were victorious.
With the confusion, they were able to steal a number of vehicles from the local garrison. The convoy made their way to Bordeaux, where they were engaged a second time and took heavy losses. This mad dash ended when the survivors boarded a passenger zeppelin bound for London. Included in the survivors, wounded, but alive, was Louis-Napoléon, son of the now-dead emperor, and his mother, Empress Beatrice. They were received in London with fanfare by the empress’ great-nephew, King Edward VIII.
The Battle of the Frontiers
The bombardment of Mayence-sur-Rhine is often considered to be the first true shots fired of the war. On the morning of Monday, August 15th, the Imperial 1st Army Group “Prinz Heinrich” launched their first offensive. The group, consisting of three field armies, launched concentrated attacks at major cities along the river with the objective of holding and destroying their bridges. The guns opened up on Mayence at 5 am, ripping into the sleeping city. This was followed by an advance from the 3rd Imperial Panzer Division.
The city fell in short order under the ferocity of the attack. However, three infantry divisions of the Republican Guard were forming in the nearby village of Alzey, and that night prepared a counterattack. As the sun set they advanced into the outskirts of the city. Finding that the Imperial forces had started to dig themselves in on the near side of the river, they began to shell the city. A request was issued for heavy support, and a tank division was dispatched from the motor pool of the French 1st Army Group South, along with a naval escort.
Similar battles were taking place near Cologne, where Imperial forces from the 2nd Army Group “Prinz Bernhard” had pushed all the way to Aachen before meeting resistance. However, it was soon discovered that the lines were permeable, such as when the French 7th Infantry Division appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, over the Rhine in Freudenstadt, driving towards Stuttgart. By the 16th, the entire line was engaged in sporadic conflict, but both sides were beginning to take heavy casualties.
On the 18th of August the 3rd Imperial Panzer Division and the 5th Revolutionary Tank Division met in a concentrated battle outside of Mayence-sur-Rhine, near the town of Schwabenheim. Fearing an engagement with a stronger imperial aether-fleet stationed over Frankfurt, the French naval escort withdrew, leaving the ground forces exposed. The battle was a decisive defeat for the French tankers, who suffered from poor communications and disorganized command. This resulted in a breakthrough, and reserve divisions of the Imperial Landwehr were pushed into the breach, quickly capturing territory throughout the Rhineland. Five French divisions were encircled and captured, and Imperial mechanized infantry were hurriedly sent forward.
The reasons for the sudden abandonment of the Imperial defensive doctrine at this point were somewhat unclear, but a barrage of communications between Field Marshal Heinrich von Schwarzenberg and Imperial High Command revealed a general confusion as to the status of the conflict. French forces had been expected to put up a tremendous fight, and so far had provided little resistance in the face of offensive operations, easily ceding ground. The Field Marshal, a member of the Imperial Nobility and a man who had never before seen war, seems to have seen his chance for glory and proposed an all-out attack towards Paris. With the Battle of Schwabenheim having been such a successful attack, he attempted to press the advantage.
The Taxi Offensive
As Imperial tanks rumbled farther towards the heartlands of the New Republic, a panic took hold of the nation.
“The first few days of the war the roads were a mess! Every few minutes a lorry passed stuffed full of soldiers. One of them that went by even had men hanging onto the outside of the bed. The soldiers waved as they passed, with bright smiles and cockades pinned to their coats. We’re off to fight for the republic! They’d call out to those of us looking on, and then they were gone, as quickly as they had come, until the next batch came along. Within a few days though they slowed down. We heard reports over the radio of our line breaking down, and chaos through the Rhine country. I heard from one of my cousins that the trains were all jammed up, and our men were stuck waiting at the station. Twiddling their thumbs while Franz shot our brave boys at the front to bits!”
During the transition between the Imperial and Republican governments, the commissariat began a mass inquest into the loyalties of every professional officer in the standing army. As part of this, a great many were arrested or detained on suspicion of reactionary sentiment. Mobilization faced severe issues as a result. The overall command structure was so thoroughly depleted that timetables were nearly impossible to keep straight, and attempts at organizing transport for all of the troops needed at the front caused a never-ending series of traffic jams and delayed trains. The most absurd example of this chaos was when the 32nd Infantry Division somehow ended with half of its regiments shipped south to Avignon, 570 kilometers away from their intended deployment in Strasbourg.
On August 20th, it was reported that the 5th Imperial Panzer Division and the 18th Panzergrenadier Division had captured Luxembourg after inflicting yet another disastrous defeat on French forces. The III Army Corps had been left burning in the fields outside of Trier. As air raids began ramping up their intensity across northern France, further disrupting movement, the situation became critical.
The idea to use civilian vehicles en masse was not an official action of the state, but rather appears to have been spontaneously thought of across the nation in the days following the Battle of Trier.
“We had been sitting at the station in Rennes for three days awaiting transport. All kitted up and ready for the fight. Each morning we were told that we would be able to depart shortly, but then there would be delays. Hours passed with agonizing slowness, until finally word would come down that we weren’t going to be able to leave yet. On the third day, I got a phone call from my father. He said that he was on his way with our old farm truck and that he intended to take us to the front. I laughed at how odd the whole situation was. My elderly father, dropping us off at the war like we were children at the theater for cartoons. You can’t be serious, I said. Absolutely I am! He responded. I heard it over the radio, serve the Fatherland by helping our men get to the front!”
And so it was that the Taxi Offensive began. A massive effort from the civilian populace to help out with mobilization. In the radio and the newspapers, rearward mustering points were defined, roads were temporarily made one-way to streamline traffic, and for the next five days the New Republic worked as one to stem the Imperial tide.
Whether the soldiers arrived in trains, off of zeppelins, or in taxis, the massive flood of manpower to the front resulted in a general stabilization of the lines, blunting the advancing Imperial forces near Verdun. A major victory came on the 26th of August, as the French Fifth Army Group North swept down from Sedan they caught Imperial forces unawares and slipped behind their lines, wreaking havoc on their supply lines and support forces. During an engagement near Arlon, Colonel Charles de Gaulle came to national prominence for the first time. His regiment encircled and defeated a numerically superior force of Imperial armor. The faster tanks employed by the New Republic allowed them to out-maneuver the slower Imperial models. As part of this battle, they captured General Vilém Jehlička, one of the Empire’s premier armor commanders.
The next day the forces of the French Third Army Group linked up with the Fifth through the Luxembourg salient, completing an encirclement of 1st Army Group “Prinz Heinrich.” This trapped large amounts of Imperial forces between Luxembourg and Verdun. The staff of the Army Group had been sent a warning several days earlier that encirclement was likely, and direct orders from High Command to withdraw to the prepared positions. Either this message was not received, or Field Marshal Schwarzenberg chose to ignore it.
The Munich Commune
While the political maelstrom of The New French Republic had drawn all eyes in the days leading up to the war, the French citizens were not the only ones expressing their discontent. Espionage operations organized by the Liberation Party had melded with those of the French state in the late 1930s. Funding was covertly directed towards the creation of groups of political agitators. Weapons were smuggled across the borders, and a shadow war began between cells of partisans and Imperial security forces.
When the Great War began, messages were sent out to cells across the Empire. These messages contained instructions to aid the efforts of the liberating army. From the start of the war, telephone lines were mysteriously cut in the night. Trains were derailed, and it was found to have been caused by sabotaged tracks. In a particularly blatant case on the night of August 19th, an ammo dump in Stuttgart caught fire, resulting in a spectacular explosion that rocked the entire city, shattering windows for miles in all directions and killing at least 143 people.
The event that shook the Empire to its core though took place on the 27th of August. A group of partisans waving red flags stormed the town hall of Munich, declaring themselves an independent commune of the Internationale. Armed with automatic weaponry and explosives, the forces of the Munich Commune took the city armory, defeating the small garrison stationed there, and then staged an attack on a nearby motor pool. There they seized 43 armored vehicles, including four Franz Joseph pattern tanks and twelve Árpád pattern Tank Hunters.
Overnight their forces swelled to nearly twenty-thousand, with cells from around Bavaria having flocked to their call. Their leader was identified as Eugen Leviné, a revolutionary firebrand who in his younger days fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. He began enacting a number of radical changes, seizing the property of the wealthy, and proclaiming mandatory military training for all workers in Munich. Eugen was celebrated as a hero in France, with his broadcasts being shown across the country as an example of why their fight was so important. Posters of his face were created to encourage solidarity with the workers of the world. The Munich Commune was not to last for long; however, as their uprising caused a deep panic to creep into the Empire.
Forces of the 3rd Army Group “Archduke Leo Karl” were diverted from their deployment along the Po River and sent north with maximum haste. Aided by aerial deployment of Strike Teams Breitenfeld and Nicopolis, the Munich Commune was put under sustained assault. Resistance from Red forces did however prove more stubborn than anticipated, with the battle resulting in heavy casualties on both sides. The surprise of the rebels having armored vehicles induced immense confusion, with the imperial forces initially thinking that they were suffering from friendly fire. Eugen Leviné and his government were officially “dissolved” on the 9th of September. Captain Jaroslav Baran of Strike Team Breitenfeld was photographed with the revolutionary’s body half covered by rubble, following the near-total destruction of the city center.
General Staff, General Confusion
The scale of damage caused by partisan activity in the early days of the Great War is, as could be expected, is nearly impossible to accurately assess or quantify. However, it is clear that the most significant impact of these actions was the effect on the psyche of the Empire. With the French lines surging all across the Western Front by the end of August, attacks being carried out against targets inside the Empire itself, and a city enacting a full-blown rebellion, the priorities of the Imperial general staff became muddled, causing increased confusion.
The overall mobilization plan in the event of war had been drawn up in precise detail years before the war started. Timetables were prepared for train and zeppelin schedules down to the minute in some cases. Because of this, partisan attacks and overeager commanders caused serious complications, resulting in massive delays. These compounded over the first two weeks, resulting in less than half of Imperial forces being on the line by the end of August, and thousands more locked in rigid schedules to deliver them to parts of the line that had been declared unimportant.
On September 10th, following through on the recommendations of Kaiser Karl VIII, Field Marshal Reinhardt Stöger-Steiner made the decision to station a substantial garrison in every city considered “at risk” of rebellion. This was a critical period, as the encirclement of 1st Army Group “Prinz Heinrich” had been entirely completed, and French forces were on the verge of recapturing Mayence-sur-Rhine. This decision caused several full divisions to be pulled out of active combat.
The Walls of Frankfurt
The result of this order, the general confusion, and the increasingly concentrated and organized French forces was the near-total collapse of the Imperial line from Cologne to Stuttgart. After the encirclement of the 1st Army Group, the remaining forces near Frankfurt were reorganized in the new “4th Army Group ‘Ludvík Krejčí.’” They performed a strategic withdrawal into the city, relying on its extremely powerful shield generator and extensive artillery stockpile to continue operations.
The advancing French forces met little resistance in the countryside and swept through like a tidal wave. The line warped, anchored by its fortress cities, but nonetheless, by the 21st of September the city of Frankfurt was entirely surrounded. French forces had advanced nearly 100 kilometers into imperial territory in less than a week. When the advance was finally stymied the line stretched over 1000 kilometers from Kontanz in Switzerland, bulged out to Ulm, then back up to Stuttgart. From there it ran north to Würzburg before wrapping around to Marburg, rejoining the Rhine around Düsseldorf, and running west to Rotterdam.
By the end of September, the Imperial army had three major pockets trapped behind the enemy line. The Luxembourg pocket containing the 1st Army Group, the Frankfurt pocket containing the under-strength 4th Army Group, and the Cologne pocket with the 5th Field Army. The line itself had stabilized, but not after the loss of tremendous amounts of territory. Imperial High Command immediately ordered the creation of two new army groups and the conscription of another two million men.
The lines around Frankfurt deepened as the friendly line grew farther and farther away. It became clear to the defenders that they were in for a protracted siege. French forces began deploying heavy artillery in an attempt to break through the defenses. Both French and Imperial military planners had estimated a total usage of around 100,000 shells per month, and had built stockpiles accordingly. With the onset of hostilities it was clear that their stockpiles would be gone before 1939 began. The land around Frankfurt turned to broken barren wasteland in less than a month. The siege had begun.
Zeppelinskrieg
With over a million soldiers trapped in the field with no chance of resupply through normal means, a radical plan was drawn up. The Imperial Zeppelin Service was the finest atmospheric air-force in the world, and the dire situation prompted innovation. A plan of zeppelin resupply was proposed with the Imperial Aether-fleet running defense high above against attack from the French fleet and air-force. Ships departed from Nuremburg and Rotterdam to deliver supplies all the way to Luxembourg and Frankfurt. Schedules were randomized in an attempt to preserve the element of surprise, but the supply runs still proved costly. As the soldiers fought on the ground in the fresh trenches of Verdun, they watched as the duels in the sky sent ships burning down back to earth.
A game of cat and mouse played out each day and night as the French attempted to catch these convoys. However the Imperial efforts paid off, and the pockets were able to provide sustained resistance, if in a reduced capacity. Fuel and ammunition were in short supply, but by fully committing to the holdout, these pockets proved tough to crack.
In these opening months of the Great War, over 300,000 men were killed in combat on the Western Front. This was the result of an incompatible command system, inexperienced officers, and a refusal on both sides to contend with the reality of a modern war. Artillery, rapid fire weaponry, aerial bombing, and cavorine gas resulted in the landscape of Western Europe being irrevocably changed. The land was stained and broken by the war. In many places, like the men who fought over it, it would never recover.
Comments