Balkan War, H2/1912

[P3D]

There's no danger of famine.

Grain was harvested  by July. What the Ottomans could do is to seize and destroy the grain they find, livestock, vineyards and olive gardens. Planting in the Med I believe could be delayed until October or even Spring. So it is like destroying the infrastructure and the livelihood of the Greek, but no danger of famine if the grain can be taken from the fields into the towns - peasants can hide grain better than soldiers could find it.

The bigger problem might be if the Ottomans destroyed the fishing boats.

[ctwaterman]

Hmmm dont know if they plant Winter Wheat and grain crops in the Mediteranian... we need a farmer... :)

Anyway I think burning grain silos and hay stacks could cause problems the fishing fleet loss would be a disaster. Simply loosing a few 1000 local farm workers caused by the Greek Rebels being called up would mean that many of the crops simply havent been harvested in certain local areas.   Just look at the loss in food production caused by the Mobilizations for WW1.

[P3D]

Hmmm dont know if they plant Winter Wheat and grain crops in the Mediteranian... we need a farmer... :)

Anyway I think burning grain silos and hay stacks could cause problems the fishing fleet loss would be a disaster. Simply loosing a few 1000 local farm workers caused by the Greek Rebels being called up would mean that many of the crops simply havent been harvested in certain local areas.   Just look at the loss in food production caused by the Mobilizations for WW1.

In Hungary harvest is usually completed by late June-early July. As in Greece weather is warmer, I guess late May-early June. So the Greek revolt erupted right in time for harvest - IMO it should have been delayed by a month, as I doubt that harvesting peasants would have start revolting at all before the crop is in. Or the unrest was confined to the cities?

[The Rock Doctor]

1 October 1912:  The Med

Allied scouting forces search for, but fail to find, the Ottoman monitors sighted on 28 September.

2 October 1912:  Serbia

Hapsburger Reichswehr and Landwehr units previously attached to the First and Second Armies beginning arriving at the front.  The Domobrani and Hoch und Deutschmeister corps have seen little action since the initial assault on the frontier back in June, having been part of the force containing the Ottoman troops east of Belgrade.  The Szent Istvan Corps is in much the same position, having spent the bulk of the summer watching the Ottoman lines southwest of Belgrade.

Three Heimwehr units rotate out of the line and take up position as the reserve for the newly-christened Fourth Army (Reserve Army having been judged "unbecoming" as the name of a frontline formation).

With Batocina now fallen, Third Army's battered units take on responsibiliy for maintaining prisoner of war camps and maintaining order in the Morava Valley.  The one intact corps, XII Heimwehr, is tasked with securing the territory between the valley of the Great Morava and the border with Romania.

The storms of the past week have now dispersed, and artillery fire begins intensifying in anticipation of a new assault on the Ottomans.

3 October 1912:  Paris

The Sublime Porte issues a brief note to the Iberian Empire, and provides copies to other interested parties on request:

The Sublime Porte confirms that commerce warfare is underway against Iberian and Hapsburger merchant shipping.  Several ships have been seized as prizes to date. 

A full list of prizes is appended.  It should be noted that matters of operational security preclude the Sublime Porte from disclosing the current location of the crews and passengers aboard the captured prizes.  The Sublime Porte can, however, confirm that there have been no fatal casualties amongst them, and all individuals are being treated in accordance with recognized international protocols.  The crews and passengers will be released at such time as the conflict between our nations concludes.

3 October 1912:  Greece

Hapsburger minesweepers beginning sweeping the harbour at Pylos, despite assurances from the local Norman naval commander that there are no mines in the harbour.  As it turns out, several mines are indeed located and detonated.

4 October 1912:  Belem, Brazil

The private yacht Princesa (780 GRT), expected from Lisbon, is reported six days overdue.

5 October 1912:  Crete

After four days of heavy fighting, Irakleios falls to the Allies.  Much of the town is destroyed during the intense battle, which claims four thousand Allied casualties as well as a thousand Ottoman dead and four thousand captured, about half of them injured.  Over two thousand casualties are tallied amongst the civilian population.

6 October 1912:  Greece

Hapsburger minesweeping operations are abruptly suspended as Ottoman torpedo-boats come into view at Pylos.  The minesweeper M-5 is sunk by gunfire, while the M-2 escapes harm by closing on the anchored Norman warships.  The Ottomans elect not to test the Normans' rules of engagement and disappear to the south after a half hour.

7 October 1912:  Serbia

Hapsburger forces attack the Ottoman positions around Trnjane.  The Reichswehr and Landwehr have drilled in the use of their gas masks, and their officers have orders that provide for the contingency of additional Ottoman gas attacks.  The soldiers are, to the extent possible, dispersed evenly along the front in order to deny the Ottomans the abiilty to shell areas of high troop density.

The Ottomans, for their part, do not employ chemical weapons in their own shooting.  Observation balloons and aeroplanes - for which the Allies continue to have no real answer -  allow for reasonably accurate counter-battery fire. 

Thousands of Hapsburgers fall as five corps surge forward across the cratered gap between lines, but their comrades-in-arms are eager to avenge the previous month's gas attacks. The attackers make it into the Ottoman trenches and ferocious fighting ensues.  Finally, the Grenzer Corps - which actually lost hundreds of their comrades to the gas attack - overwhelms and breaks the reservists facing them.  Within minutes, the Ottoman 3 Reserve Corps is collapsing, and 1 Janissary is compelled to commit its reserves to secure its flank. 

Unfortunately for the Ottomans, it's evident that the battle is lost and a withdrawal is in order.  Both 1 Janissary and 4 Reserve are in good order and begin moving south towards Nis, while isolated battalions and regiments of 3 Reserve attempt to maintain cohesion as others degrade into mobs.  Many of the latter will be dead or captured by the end of the day, victims of Hapsburger cavalry.

Total casualties on the day are thirteen thousand Hapsburgers, along with nine thousand dead Ottomans and seventeen thousand captured, about half of them wounded to some degree.

8 October 1912:  Crete

Hapsburger minesweepers begin the task of clearing Souda Bay.

8 October 1912:  Red Sea

The Iberian armored cruisers Henrique o Navegador and Cristobol Colon, accompanied by three DKB protected cruisers, depart Aden for the Red Sea.

8 October 1912:  Paris

Observers in Paris note that the Ottoman, Iberian, and Hapsburgers are meeting once again...

[Borys]

Teaser:

Mid October, Vienna, Hoffburg Palace

Aloise von und zu Lichtenstein waited outside the chapel. Stefan was praying, and he did not wish to interrupt. Then the Emperor parepatically took for the gardens. Striding alongside, Aloise began to pass on the news.
-  the Turk has cracked and apparently accepted our demands;
- by God and the Virgin - let it be so! .. pause ... with all the face saving, messy, conflict generating and cumbersome arrangements for Albania and Macedonia?
- yes;
Stefan sighed.
- so We are to rule those lands, but as tributuaries of the Sultan ... a wry smile - thinking of it, it is funny in a certain way;
- funny or not, the fact is that the border with the Ottomans will be mercifully short ...
- ... and not yet fortified ...
- ... and we hold Albania - so our exit from the Adriatic is safeguarded. Also, this gives us land communication with the Iberians.
-  Speaking of Iberians, Jaime - he made a harsh aspirating noice at the begiing of the word, in the Spanish manner - wrote a letter telling me about Alfonso taking the Greek crown.
- an excellent choice, if I may say so. I believe that it was Alfonso who was the real driving force of the Carlistas.  Carlos struck me a bit as a person who - to use an idiom I picked up from von Czartoryski - needed a kick in the butt to get going. While Alfonso always had a fire in his belly ...
- King of the Hellenes, he is to be called, or apparently Vasileus ton Ellinon in the modern Greek language. So different from what we had in school ... Stefan shook his head in bewilderment ...
- Vasileus, or Basileus?
- meh, with the Iberians you never know - they make a funny sound which could be either b or v - so maybe the Greeks have that too. A match made in heaven ...
- .. of the Helenes? How convenient - that leaves upon the issue over what LANDS exactly he rules - hurr-hurr

Aloise went back to more practical issues.
- a coronation in Belgrade?
- that's still undecided - on one hand this will make the Serbs happy, on the other, it will upset some Croats and Hungarians. And the tricky issue of who'll be crowning me - should be Lukian, by the way - but should I really be crowned by an Orthodox Patriarch, and how will the Ultramontagns react to that. Speaking of Serbia, Boreovic wrote that he's pushing on Nish, with cavalry patrols going around the city already beyond.
- that's good news, many say that the snows will be early this year, and we would not have pushed to the Aegan this year anyway. Unless the Ottoman troops run away en masse ...
- true 'bout the weather - and the Heer needs to rethink some areas. It turned out that we lag in some modern, scientific armaments or aids - like those flying thingies used for reconaisence or spotting for the artillery.
- and what does he say about the state of these lands?
- nothing - he wouldn't be bothered by that.  He's no head for administration. But broader minded officers report serious destruction and disrupton of trade. We'll have to instigate extensive Winterhilfe in the south. Half rations to everybody in Serbia and Montenegro, and quarter rations in Albania and Macedonia, to keep them from starving.
- is the Empress going with you to Rome?
Mention of his enstranged wife brought out another sigh
- she's still undecided - on one hand she'd like to go and see the sights, then at other times she says she's not interested in meeting hordes of clean shaved, Pope-worshiping schismatics - she'll do her Duty, of course, but making it painful for me in the process.

[Blooded]

Note to self. UNK Minesweepers suck or perhaps I am spread way to thin. Time to send some additional Coastal sweepers methinks.

[The Rock Doctor]

Could be either.  I imagine it's rather difficult to know there are no mines around unless you knew how many there were to start with.

[Blooded]

True, True.

I just had the thought as I was reading.  "Oh... don't worry about we have cleared any mines from the area'.  BOOM!  :-[ 'Oh Goodness....what was that?'....   ;D

[Desertfox]

New Zion will be sure to use the Norman news to pound at the Iberians. Why didn't the cowardly Iberians shoot at them like they did to an old cruiser of the Chagos...

[P3D]

New Zion will be sure to use the Norman news to pound at the Iberians. Why didn't the cowardly Iberians shoot at them like they did to an old cruiser of the Chagos...

Picturing Iberians - who faced the Ottoman battleline and entrenched troops in Crete - as coward would only decrease one's credibility. Like the Georgian claims that "the Russians started the war when 5 battalions entered South Ossetia in response to the bombardment and siege of Russian piecekeepers in Tshinkvali".

[miketr]

New Zion will be sure to use the Norman news to pound at the Iberians. Why didn't the cowardly Iberians shoot at them like they did to an old cruiser of the Chagos...

Picturing Iberians - who faced the Ottoman battleline and entrenched troops in Crete - as coward would only decrease one's credibility. Like the Georgian claims that "the Russians started the war when 5 battalions entered South Ossetia in response to the bombardment and siege of Russian piecekeepers in Tshinkvali".

That aside... Iberia doesn't own any minesweepers...  The Ionian Patrol force is Hapsburg...

[Desertfox]

20,000 casualties and a torpedo boat lost, that pales in comparision with the loses by the Austrians. Looks like the Iberians had their Ally fight the war for them while they sat around shooting defenseless neutrals. Oh and it was the Austrians who shouldered most of the fighting at the Naval Battle of Crete.

There was no challenge at all against the Normans who where actually landing troops, while a lone obsolete cruiser that was doing absolutely nothing was shoot to pieces by an overwhelming force. Cowards, at least that's how they are viewed by the Zionites.

[P3D]

Iberia got their own royal line sit on the Greek throne, and two small islands of doubtful importance*. The Habsburgs incorporated a third of the Balkans into their empire. Clearly, the Austrians were tricked by Iberia to loose hundreds of thousands of soldiers for marginal gains.

Zion can have whatever delusional impressions on the Iberians.

20,000 casualties and a torpedo boat lost, that pales in comparision with the loses by the Austrians. Looks like the Iberians had their Ally fight the war for them while they sat around shooting defenseless neutrals. Oh and it was the Austrians who shouldered most of the fighting at the Naval Battle of Crete.

There was no challenge at all against the Normans who where actually landing troops, while a lone obsolete cruiser that was doing absolutely nothing was shoot to pieces by an overwhelming force. Cowards, at least that's how they are viewed by the Zionites.

*not much of strategic importance with other islands already in Iberian possession.

[miketr]

OOC: If Zion wants a fight it can have it Foxy... ;)

IC:He shoots... its good... score!!!  New Zion newspaper ends up in wastepaper basket.

As to the Chago's; Iberia secured its own foothold...