SerbiAAR: a veteran Serbia-only AAR

[FOARP]

20 July 1918, Northern Front - To try to speed things up, a combined British and Belgian force has landed on the North Coast of Germany. Whether they can sustain themselves there for long is far from certain however.

(full disclosure - in one of my "interventions" I accidentally loaded some British units into amphibious transports rather than transport ships, and decided to roll with it. The Americans had basically cleared the German North sea coast anyway so I thought "Why not?". However, I don't think they be able to supply themselves properly, at least not unless more cities fall. Bremen and Osnabruck are threatened but the Germans are certain to rail troops in)

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20 July 1918, Italian Front - and to finish off our survey of the state of the war, in Italy, where the forces of the Entente at one point in mid-1917 stood on the line of the Po - indeed the CP forces had managed to cross the Po and capture Bolonga - the Entente is now back across the Po and threatening the CP defences nearly Verona.

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3 August 1918, Serbian Front - The Serbian cavalry division defending Belgrade was finally destroyed after attacks from what must have been 6 or more Austro-Hungarian infantry corps (I think this was only possibly because of the movement bonus the AI gets in a veteran difficulty game), but a British assault retook the city, albeit with significant losses.

In Bosnia, in contrast, the Germans just held out after attacks from primarily Serb troops from all points of the clock. It seems nothing comes easy in this war.

The same story of frustration played out on other fronts - Mannheim held out, Bremen is surrounded but still German, Osnabruck was reinforced. Only in Italy were two CP corps destroyed and the tentative advance made towards Verona.

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17 August 1918, Serbian front - At last the defences at Belgrade hold this time! If only just - I railed the battered 2-strength British infantry corps that was left in the city after the Austro-Hungarians again attacked with several corps to Sofia for some well-deserved R&R and brought in a semi-fresh 8-strength corps. Have Kaiser Karl's troops had enough?

One welcome reinforcement has arrived - an artillery unit that has marched all the way from Basra!

Elsewhere, Coblenz and Bremen fall, the Entente troops invading Northern Germany reach the gates of Hamburg - but do they have enough supplies to survive there?

German morale has dropped now to 19%, French morale is steady at 14%.

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30 August 1918, Serbian front - The front held this turn, but at a cost - the British corps that occupied the bridgehead north of the Danube was destroyed. Not much progress anywhere along the line here, but Belgrade remains Serb!

French morale is steady at 14%, German morale has fallen to 16%! Dusseldorf and Mainz fell this turn, so that will certainly sink further.

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14 September 1918, Serbian Front - The Austro-Hungarians seem to be thinning out on this front, probably because of the disasters their German allies are suffering in the west. My forces make use of this to consolidate their gains - it seems there will be no great advance to the north this year though.

Elsewhere German morale now stands at 10%, French at 12%. Essen and Mainz both fell this turn so can it be long before the Germans finally quit?

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5 October 1918, Serbian Front - The Entente positions around Belgrade stand firm. Valjevo is surrounded on three sides but the Central Powers continue to hold out there - Emperor Karl's men standing firm to defend the territory they have captured. They may well wonder what has happened to their German allies in this fight as there are only two weakened German corps still on this front. The reason? Well, that's going to be covered in the next post.

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5 October 1918, Western Front - The Entente fronts in Northern and Western Germany have joined into a single continuous front running all the way from the outskirts of Hamburg in the North to the banks of the Rhine along the Swiss border in the south. A definite breakthrough has been achieved in the Ruhr valley, with an advancing Entente spearhead pointed towards the city of Kassel.

German morale now sits at 2%, French at 12% - if the war is not over this turn, it will certainly be over next turn!

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5 October 1918, Italian Front - and to round out our tour of the front on what is likely the last turn of the war we have the Italian front. Verona is back in Entente hands but a wide swath of north-eastern Italian remains under the jack-booted heels of the Teutonic Powers.

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5 October 1918 - Somewhere on the German part of the line....

Hauptmann Schmidt's column of wagons bringing supplies to the German Alpen Corps north-east of Sarajevo was late. The boggy Balkan roads were trouble enough to deal with, but there was some kind of traffic jam ahead - who knew for what reason?

"It shouldn't have been like this" Schmidt mused to himself. "We should have won the war back in '17 when the Russians collapsed and we had the advantage - but these damned Serbs just didn't know when to quit!". He remember his excitement in 1914 when Germany declared war - his certainty that the war would be short and victorious. Things definitely hadn't worked out that way: the front line now ran deep through Germany, and the forces of Germany and their Austrian allies were being forced back on all other fronts.

The sound of singing ended Schmidt's reverie. "Feldwebel Weber, what on earth is going on ahead?". "Blowed if I know" the old NCO replied.

Schmidt put his cap on and made sure his pistol was in its holster. "I'm going forward to have a look - we should have been moving hours ago!"

Walking forward along the stationary wagons ahead of him Schmidt saw things that stunned him: German soldiers falling about drunk, German soldiers with their tunics unbuttoned staggering about any which way. He grabbed one young Private by the lapels "What on earth do you think you are doing!?!". "War's over mate, so you can go and do one..." said the Private, and wandered off before Schmidt could even respond.

Reaching the head of the column he was confronted by a group of soldiers wearing red armbands, one of them - obviously a leader of some sorts - was giving a speech: "Don't toady to the Junkers! Fight for your own freedom and join us!". He drew his pistol and shouted in his loudest voice "Halt! Your all under arrest for insubordination and mutiny!".

"Get 'im Joschka!" yelled the leader of the group. Schmidt turn to see a boyish-looking soldier with his rifle raised, the sound of the rifle being fired was the last thing Schmidt ever heard....

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19 October 1918 - Berlin

Kaiser Wilehlm II, Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Burgrave of Nuremberg, Count of Hohenzollern, Duke of Silesia and of the County of Glatz, Grand Duke of the Lower Rhine (etc.) twitched back the curtain - not with his left hand as that had been withered from birth, but with his right. Down on Unter Den Linden the soldiers were singing again, sometimes the Internationale, sometimes other songs, but none of them to his liking. In 1914 they had sang there too - but then it had been Heil dir im Siegerkranz, the German national anthem. This time not patriotism but revolutionary ardour was what inspired them!

He turned back to the situation map. "So Field Marshal, the situation is truly hopeless?". Ludendorf's face was pale and grey, the result of too many sleepless nights and too few answers, "Yes, your majesty, our lines are broken and there is now no reserve to fill them". Kaiser Wilhelm picked up his pen, his pen paused above the abdication notice, and signed it with a shaking hand "There, it is done!"

[FOARP]

2 November 1918, Belgrade -

All along the line Serbian soldiers rushed through the ruins of the Serb capital to reach their objectives before the hour struck. Again and again the stubborn chattering of the Schwarzlose machine guns wielded by brave (or foolish, depending on your point of view) machine gun teams of the KuK army held them up, and again and again the Serb artillery crashed out to obliterate another Austro-Hungarian strong point.

A Serb officer glanced at his watch - ten minutes to go, now five. "Let me live" he silently prayed, "let me survive this terrible war that took so many others". He thought of his home in Valjevo, now occupied by the cursed Austrians, and of the friends and brothers he would never see again lost in the bloody fighting all along the Danube.

At one minute left to 11 o' clock he raised a field periscope (a fancy name for a a board with a couple of mirrors on it) from the shell crater he was sheltering in - an Austrian machine gunner could be seen blazing away towards the advancing Serbs, exposing himself recklessly, fighting a war that was already lost. Thirty seconds left, now ten.

At 11 o'clock the guns fell silent all along the line. A sudden silence descended on Austrian and Serb. The young Serb officer risked raising his head this time and was met with an amazing sight: the Austrian machine gunner who had been serving his weapon so coolly, as though amazed to still be alive, slowly stood up from his sand-bagged position, bowed ostentatiously towards the Serb lines, and hurried towards the rear.

The war was over! Thank god the war was over!

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Final positions:

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Losses:

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Final thoughts:

1) Without the surprise attack on Bulgaria and capture of Constantinople bringing about the fall of the Ottomans freeing up massive forces to reinforce Serbia, the Serbs would have been squashed flat by the Central Powers within a few months of the Russian surrender. Though it wasn't my plan (I was hoping to rescue the Russians) it really paid off. The easiest way for the Central Powers player (if they were human) to counter it would be to simply crush the Serbs quicker and then focus on the Russians.

2) Without the US war entry coming when it did the French would have surrendered by early 1918 at the latest. This time, it seems the Yanks really did save the day.

3) ...but did they? Because had the Serbs not held out in the first place then all the Central Powers forces that were deployed there would have been available for France/Italy and the war there would have been lost before any Americans could have arrived on the scene.

4) The combination of Veteran difficulty and using AI control really made this one difficult. I'll cop to cheating by manually controlling a lot of the units in the west (though AI was left switched on so they were still shuffled and made suicide attacks as the AI is wont to do) but had I not done this the war would have ended much earlier.

5) The amphibious invasion of northern Germany worked out OK considering that the troops I used to do it probably couldn't have been usefully deployed to the western front as there were already too many units there. If I were to do it again I would make the initial landing further east and try to rush Hamburg to beat the supply issues I suffered from. For it to work against a human player, though, they would have to have already lost the naval war - hard.

6) Ultimately the real surprise for me was the just how historically things turned out despite the ahistorical survival of Serbia - France and Italy were both invaded and recovered, the Germans collapsed due to demoralisation rather than fighting to the bitter end. Until the very end of the war, when the Germans started to crumble, it felt like front-to-front warfare and there was no blitzkrieg of the kind that is possible in other WW1 games. I mean, a November 1918 war-end is (unfortunately) pretty rare in these games, just as the war ending in 1945 or later tends to be rare in WW2 games - but it happened because of the way the game played out.

7) One obvious point: playing this has taken a very long time, even with the AI controlling countries a lot of the time....

[The Land]

Congratulations on a greatAAR, I've really enjoyed reading it

[OldCrowBalthazor]

This has been really enjoyable and interesting. (And instructive too) Thanks! [8D]