Europe Part 4: The Italian War
about 1 year ago
– Sun, Nov 05, 2023 at 11:18:57 PM
We're finally here! The big war.
Well, the European big war. We'll get to the other ones later.
We're discussing an early 20th century industrialized war, so this update will cover some fairly unpleasant topics including ethnic cleansing, and wartime atrocities against civilians.
Background
The Italian-Venetian War, occasionally called the Great Italian War or the Venetian War depending on where you are, had its roots in Italian irredentism and long-standing tensions in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Italy's slow unification over the course of the 19th century had aimed to unite all Italian-speaking regions in Europe, but had never actually succeeded. Venice had maintained its independence, while the adriatic coast was controlled by the HRE and newly independent Balkan nations.
This had been a sticking point for some time, resulting in escalating tensions between Italy and its neighbors in the first years of the 20th century. Protest movements in favor of Italian unification rocked the Istrian peninsula, while the Venetian-Italian border was a regular source of border skirmishes and street violence between Venetian and Italian nationalists, as well as various revolutionary groups.
Violence escalated through the 1910s, culminating in the ascension of hardline nationalists to the Venetian Collegio, and an Italian invasion in July '23. The Ottomans declared war in defense of Venice, while the Russians declared war on the Ottomans in defense of Italy, while the Holy Roman Empire declared upon the Russians due to pre-existing conflicts over the partition of Poland. France, meanwhile, sent an army corps supplemented by colonial troops to assist Italy, but its commitment was hampered by a desire to avoid a general war with the Holy Roman Empire.
The War in Southern Europe
The Italian invasion started as a mixed success. Land offensives into Venice ran into surprisingly stiff resistance, both the Venetian and Italian land armies were fairly inexperienced and Italian formations found themselves unable to overcome dug-in defenses until the French arrived. Before the front stabilized, the Italians would advance as far as Padua, where much of the city was shelled to rubble during the fighting. The naval front was kinder to them, the Venetian Navy was forced into port with light losses, mainland Venice was blockaded, and the invasion of Dalmatia was swift and relatively painless, with Italian troops occupying land in Montenegro and Albania.
Venetian salvation would come not from the Ottomans, who were distracted by the Caucasus front and sent only a token force, but from the Austrians, who checked the Italian advance and opened supply routes to Venice and its remaining garrisons in Southern Istria. By March '24, Italian counterattacks would take much of Imperial and Venetian Istria, but the collapse of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in September '24 would see the Ottoman fleet break the blockade and land token reinforcements in Istria and Venice.
Within months, Italy had been decisively repulsed from the Venetian front and Istria, but the seas remained contested and it had managed to hold Dalmatia and parts of Albania against all comers. The decisive factor, in the end, was French recalcitrance. The war had been bloodier than expected, and there was little appetite at home for a general war with the Holy Roman Empire for Italy's sake. As such, with French pressure, Italy and Venice signed a ceasefire in February '25 as a prelude to larger negotiations. Both Italy and Venice claim that they will not accept a peace where they do not hold Dalmatia, and Albania has refused to sign.
The Southern Front was the war's least brutal front. 36,000 soldiers and nearly 100,000 civilians died during the war, with 120,000 soldiers injured and more than half a million displaced by the fighting. Venetians and Slavs in Italian-occupied territory, and supporters of unification in Venetian territory, were often massacred while wholesale breakdowns in discipline on the Venetian front often resulted in atrocities against civilians and captives.
The Polish Front
Prussia invaded Russian-occupied Polish-Lithuania in October '23 in the hopes of reclaiming Warsaw and Poland, only for the Reichstag not to back the invasion, leaving Prussia to go it alone for the first months of war. This went poorly immediately, with the limited gains of Prussia's first offensives being flipped, and leading to a Russian counter-invasion of Prus and Austrian Poland in January '24.
This, in turn, led to the Reichstag finally backing the war and the deployment of the Austrian national army and the Reichsarmee in truth. Prussia stabilized, but the Austrians suffered a series of humiliating defeats. By June '24, Russia had conquered most of Poland, but had shattered its teeth on a finally-united Reichsarmee.
However, the near-total destruction of the Black Sea Fleet and the Crimean revolution that followed gutted the Russian position. Small insurgencies were popping up across Ukraine and Poland, and there was the very real possibility of an Ottoman army marching out of Crimea and sending the entire Ukraine into open revolt. Armies and supplies were rerouted, with the Russian army in Poland getting the short end of the stick. Counter-attacks pushed Russia out of Warsaw and over the Vistula before peace in June of '25.
The Polish front was horrific, but had less repression of civilians than other fronts. It was the only front to have more military than civilian deaths. 150,000 soldiers and 55,000 civilians died during the war, with most civilian casualties occuring during the fighting around Konigsberg in the spring and summer of '24.
The Caucasus and Crimean Front
By far, the Caucasus and Crimea were the bloodiest theatres of war. Near the end of July '23, the Russians advanced through Georgia into the Ottoman Empire, aiming to capture Western Armenia and keep the Ottomans from reinforcing Venice. The two hundred mile front ran straight into the Allahuekber Mountains, with the black sea coast as the only truly open terrain on the border.
In the theater, the Russians deployed Admiral Kolchak's Black Fleet patrolled the waters, harassing and bombarding Ottoman reinforcements and supply trains while delivering resupply and fresh troops to General Vladimir Dragomirov's First Caucasian Corps. Opposing them was Halil Kut Pasha's Sixth Army and the Ottoman Fleet, led by Mustafapali Muzaffer Pasha.
Early Russian advances swiftly slowed: Early offensives into the Pontic Mountains failed, splitting the front into a two-pronged assaulted towards Rize on the Black Sea Coast, and Kars in the Armenian Highlands. The coastal assault took Rize within months, supported by coastal bombardment of defensive positions and Ottoman supply lines by the Black Sea Fleet. The highlands offensive was a disaster, the Ottoman Army pushed back into Georgia, took Akhaltsikhe, and was only stopped by a lethally cold winter and dogged defense by Russian reinforcements.
The winter of '24 would make offensives nearly impossible. More would die to the cold then gunfire, and a failed Ottoman offensive towards Batumi ended in a humiliating failure thousands of ottoman soldiers freezing to death, and Halil Kut's reassignment to a Syrian garrison. His replacement was Mehmet Vehip Pasha.
By year's end, the fighting had killed ninety seven thousand soldiers and eight thousand civilians. It would be a serene prelude of what was to come.
The true action of Winter, however, would happen in Russia. Russian suppression of various peasant revolts had left many of their outlying territories political powderkegs. The Black Hundreds performed pogroms, anarchists assassinated local landlords and potentates, and the Green Band had begun smuggling Iranian arms to dissidents in Siberia, Khiva, Astana, and Ukraine. Two of the last three Tsars had been assassinated here, and the reaction to any burblings of dissent was brutal repression.
Winter brought with it the twin evils of conscription and starvation as a failed harvest pushed many peasants to desperation. Riots and protests marched into the new year until February, when an explosion of violence rocked the empire. Iran, seeing an opportunity to spite a rival, increased its extant funding of the Green Band and dissident propaganda in the hopes of loosening Russia's grip on its central asian territories.
In most of the empire, these protests and proto-rebellions were swiftly suppressed in most of the empire. However, in Crimea, more than half the garrison had been denuded for the Georgian offensive, leaving security to communist-sympathetic sailors and paramilitaries.
Had the war at sea gone better, this may have come to nothing. However, with the front frozen, the Ottoman and Black Sea fleets would take the opportunity to maul each other. Both scoured the coast from Trabzond to Batumi, shelling anything that so much as resembled a military position, bombarding cities, and dueling with enemy ships. Submarines roamed free, sinking the Ottoman pre-dreadnought Hayreddin Barbarossa, while the Russian Dreadnought Imperator George I was destroyed by Ottoman Barnacles.
While the winter's feuding favored the Black Sea Fleet, which could afford its losses more than the Ottomans, it meant that Sevastopol's docks were only ever half-full. This, in turn, meant that many of the sailors meant to keep Sevastopol safe, and to respond to nearby disasters, simply didn't exist.
At 9:45 AM, on April 8th, a member of the Black Hundreds shot Cafer Seydamet Qirimir as he spoke on the need for an independent, democratic, Crimean republic to a small crowd in Sevastopol. Qirimir was a Tatar and member of the Milliy Firqa, a revolutionary organization dedicated to bringing about an independent and democratic Crimea with significant support from the Green Band. Members of the Firqa in the crowd turned on the assassin and the Black Hundreds he was with.
The brawl turned into a riot, both the Black Hundreds and the Milliy Firqa turned all their armed members out onto Sevastopol's streets. As violence spread other groups, notably a local Anarchist group led by a Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian farmer, and the local Bolsheviks, who had strong ties to the Black Fleet's sailors, grabbed their own arms to defend themselves.
Within three days, the riot had turned into an all-out battle: Black Hundreds against an impromptu and unwieldy alliance of Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and Tatar Nationalists, with non-Bolshevik sailors looking, confused, from the sidelines. No-one was quite sure what was happening, with newspapers declaring a Communist uprising, a protest against conscription, a pogrom, and more to a deeply confused Saint Petersburg.
With the Black Hundreds scattered, violence spreading into the countryside, there was a moment where anything might happen. The Regent called upon the Black Sea Fleet to restore order, landlords began arming themselves in suspicion of a peasant rebellion, and many in the riots began to disperse. Then Noman Celibicihan declared the assembly of a Tatar Qurultahay to form a new Crimean Republic and petitioned the Ottomans and Hapsburgs for aid.
At a stroke, every member of the week's violence, no matter their actual motivation, was a revolutionary in the eyes of the Tsar. Those docked ships that hadn't been captured by the Bolsheviks fled to Novorossiysk, the Anarchists ripped open every prison they could find, and Tatars began to arm themselves.
Unprepared and against the might of the Russian army, the newly declared Crimean People's Republic ought to have been a doomed affair. But they were fortunate: Winter had ended, and the war was back on.
The winter had seen Mehmed Sabahaddin rise to power in the Ottoman Empire, where he had managed to form a fragile Ottomanist coalition in the wake of Unionist collapse. He inherited every problem the Unionists faced, an increasingly violent war with Russia most thought he would lose, and a broad assumption that he would be drummed out during the '26 elections, if he lasted that long. He backed Celibicihan's declaration, less out of an expectation that it might succeed, and more that it might distract the Russians for crucial months.
As March thawed the Caucasus, the Ottoman and Russian spring offensives slammed into each other. In Georgia, over-stretched defenders were immediately overrun by an Ottoman armored advance into the Colchis lowlands. By early april, the Ottomans were besieging Batumi and advancing towards Sochi and Tbilisi, rendering the entire Rize-Batumi advance into a pocket. The Russian advance along the coast had been making good progress towards Trabzond until the news arrived, at which point Dragomirov retreated to Rize and dug in.
As events in Crimea spiraled out of control, Russian reinforcements raced down the railways, crashing into Ottoman detachments at Sochi while the Black Fleet stretched itself thin. They now had to provide coastal bombardment in Crimea and the war-front, resupply the pocket, protect convoys, and fight the Ottoman fleet.
Kolchak, unsure of the loyalty of his sailors, opted to prioritize the offensive and not risk further mutinies by risking the navy in Crimea. This kept the Ottoman Fleet from seriously contesting the war-torn coastal front, but allowed them to funnel supplies and sympathizers to the spreading revolution in Crimea almost unopposed.
Still, it, and the rapid redeployment of troops on the Austrian front, stabilized the lines. By mid-June, thirty thousand Ottomans had died trying and failing to retake Rize, while Tbilisi remained in Russian hands.
On Crimea, things were going less well. Riots and rebellions had spread into southern Ukraine, peasants were murdering their landlords, mennonites were hunting peasants like game, and most cities on the peninsula had declared some form of revolutionary council or loyalty to the nascent Republic. Though the legitimacy of many of these claims was questionable, only Yalta remained nominally loyal to the Tsar, primarily due to the crew of the damaged Dreadnought Imperatritsa Aleksandra and a particularly resilient band of Cossacks.
However, it was not an organized rebellion. Argument in the nascent Qurultahay was constant, with the Bolsheviks, Right-reformers, Cossacks, and Crimeans jockeying for position. What military they had was largely bands of militia with no training, turncoats with no discipline, and Cossacks with no obedience to the new government. Austrian and Ottoman aid, and then advisors, were the primary factor keeping the makeshift government from collapsing.
In June '24 Zhilinsky and the Russian Sixth army arrived in Ukraine. They put down a nationalist rebellion in Kyiv first, summarily executing hundreds before beginning their march through the countryside. Reprisals were brutal, but often ineffective and resulted in rebels and protestors turning into guerillas. Train tracks were sabotaged, collaborators murdered, and scouts ambushed, resulting in the army massacring any they suspected of rebel sympathies. This slowed their advance into Crimea, especially as they combatted the growing Makhnovist rebels in southern Ukraine.
At the start of July, Zhilinsky decided to end the rebellion at its source. While the bulk of the Sixth Army continued anti-guerilla work, he would take a unit of fifteen thousand men to take Sevastopol in a combined attack with the Black Sea Fleet. Unknown to him, the Ottomans, fed inflated stories of Crimean success, had agreed to send two divisions of soldiers to Sevastopol to aid their new ally.
On July 14th, Celibicihan's new government learned of Zhilinsky's offensive and sent a message to their Ottoman backers: Zhilinsky would arrive before their reinforcements. They had to send more help, more quickly, or it would all be for naught.
The Ottoman government, unwilling to risk a catastrophe, instead returned that it would be unable to send the reinforcements at all if the situation was untenable, and that they would instead be sent in the fall if the government still stood.
The Crimeans were sure there was no mercy to be had from the government and no help to be had from abroad, and so steeled themselves to die. The Ottoman civilian government was sure that their distraction had failed, and so steeled itself for
The divisions had already departed. The exact reason Muzaffer Pasha disobeyed the order to turn around remains unknown. Though he insisted he refused it on grounds of principle and religious solidarity with Crimean muslims, it was broadly agreed that there was a radio error and he had simply never received the order.
On July 18th, the Black Sea Fleet task force arrived at Sevastopol and began bombarding it. The task force, lead by the Dreadnought Imperator Nikolai I, represented about a third of the fleet's surface strength and its last functional Dreadnought. The captured Bolshevik vessels were swiftly sunk or fled to Kerch, and morale in the city plummeted.
On July 27th, Zhilinsky's divisions hit Crimean lines, ten miles from Sevastopol. The Russian mech corps, supported by vanguards of polar jinn, ripped through hastily prepared trenchworks until they hit the city's urban sprawl. Here, dogged defense from doomed men forced the Zhilinsky into house-to-house fighting.
After dawn on July 29th, Ottoman seaplanes spotted the bombardment squadron. The Ottoman squadron, lead by the Dreadnought Kemal Reis, represented more than two thirds of the total Ottoman fleet escorting transports carrying twenty thousand men. It included the only Ottoman seaplane carrier.
As the Russian squadron began bombarding the city, the Ottomans closed over the horizon, leaving their transports and the carrier behind. The resulting battle was brutal, and culminated in the brutalized Nikolai and most of its squadron sinking, with the survivors fleeing to Yalta and Novorossiysk, and significant damage to the Ottoman fleet. This battle technically included the first carrier strike on a hostile warship during wartime, however Ottoman pilots were not trained for such maneuvers, and the bombing raid was utterly ineffective.
In Sevastopol, this turn of events was met with utter confusion, as the government was no longer expecting Ottoman assistance and so the Crimeans hadn't told anyone else in the city about them. The disembarking Ottoman troops were met with a mixture of elation, confusion, and sporadic friendly fire incidents.
Within a day, Fuat Sakir Pasha, the division commander, had taken over the defense of Sevastopol. As naval bombardment and air raids turned against Zhilinsky's 6th, the Russians began a retreat that swiftly turned into a horrific rout halfway across the peninsula. Yalta fell so quickly many of its ships, including the damaged Aleksandra, were captured by the Ottomans, while the 6th army managed to hold at Pervomaiske.
However, the damage was done. The Black Sea Fleet, disemboweled, could no longer hold the line in the south. It bled in a dozen minor engagements, and soon stopped being a major force in the war. This doomed the Rize-Batumi pocket. Unable to rely on resupply, reinforcement, or evacuation, Dragomirov surrendered with the thirty thousand men under his command in early October, while Batumi would fall after the winter freeze, in December.
Where a rebellion in Crimea and losses in the Caucasus had been concerning, a Turkish army of unknown size in Crimea was viewed as an existential threat by Petrograd. Zhilinsky was removed from command in favor of General Pokrovsky, and a new army was raised and rushed to the Crimean front. Meanwhile, seeking to capitalize on success, the Ottomans poured troops into Crimea and past Sochi.
The winter freeze saved Tbilisi and slowed fighting in the Caucasus, where Vehip Pasha was unwilling to risk a winter catastrophe like his predecessor. In Crimea, however, the war intensified.
Trenchlines carved through the Crimean steppe, artillery ploughed fields with bodies, and entire regiments of soldiers vanished into the blender of war. As the battleground pushed further north, ever towards the Isthmus of Perekop, the fighting only grew more bloody. It was a new sort of hell, built for the industrial age. None were immune, and Sakir Pasha would be killed be a stray artillery round near year's end.
January '25 saw a crisis for the Ottomans in Syria. A local rebellion, brutally put down by Halil Kut, would trigger a border crisis with the ever-belligerent Jinn Balad-us-Shams. This wouldn't cause a war, but did draw away troops meant for the front and pushed Sabahaddin to begin discussing peace.
Still, there were many months yet for men to die.
Summer arrived, and with it a collapse in the east. The Ottomans took Tbilisi, freeing several divisions for a new offensive north of Sochi. Demoralized and deprioritized in favor of Crimea, Russian lines collapsed in early June. Where in Ukraine fighting had reached Mariupol, in Russia there were serious concerns that the Ottomans would take Krasnodar.
It is here that General Kornilov, with the backing of a minor member of the Duma named Alexander Kerensky, entered the field. Fresh off the Austrian front, he was nominally under General Samsonov, who had been managing the Caucasian front since Dragomirov's army had been trapped. With Alexander's backing, Kornilov usurped control of the front and began a series of offensives that would push the Ottomans back to Sochi by July.
In Crimea, the Russian defense line at Perekop had collapsed in unclear circumstances, with many surviving soldiers claiming that monsters and their own comrades had risen from mass graves and attacked in the night. The Ottoman advance was slowed by the resulting chaos, but soon pushed the Russians out of Crimea's claimed borders and into Ukraine.
By August '25, the worst of the fighting had died down. A peace deal was under negotiations, and though the war was technically still on, it had been reduced to occasional skirmishes and night raids at Sochi and the Crimean border. The shape of the peace was on the horizon:
A free Crimean Republic, recognized by Russia. Territorial concessions in Georgia. The Black Sea rendered an Ottoman Lake, and whatever reparations the Ottomans could wring from the Russians.
To win it, Nine hundred and twenty thousand soldiers, and approximately two million civilians, died. Another two million soldiers were wounded, and an unknown number of civilians were displaced.
The Russian occupation of Rize, Ottoman occupation of Georgia, and Ottoman offensive in the North Caucasus were all subject to the horrors of war, especially as veteran soldiers became ever-more inured to the suffering of civilians around them. Tens of thousands were displaced in Georgia and the Anatolian coast, but the worst happened in Crimea and Ukraine.
There, entire villages were forced to flee the war, thousands were buried under the rubble of their own homes, and atrocity after atrocity was inflicted upon civilians for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Russians made a practice of brutality, while the Ottomans took what they needed from the people and left it to their governments to figure out the price.
Those in the newly minted Crimean Republic have an uncertain future ahead of them. Trudoviks, Socialists, Tatar nationalists, and Bolsheviks all envision different futures for the young nation, while the internationalist, anarchist Makhnovites have an at-best uneasy relationship with the state they are technically part of. The nascent state relies utterly on the Ottomans for defense and knows not what the future holds, and the war's final horror, the Majooj, is yet to make itself known.
Still, for the moment, there is hope.
What did You Do During the War?
This is the section that's actually going to get published! Everything else is getting cut to, like, a two page spread. It was originally supposed to be in this update but, as you might have noticed, this got slightly out of hand.
Next update whenever I get home from Chicago.
