THE ATLANTIC FEDERATION, PART 4
THE ALLIED FLEETS, INTELLIGENCE, AND LOGISTICS
Coordinating the Navies
"You'll never see a more powerful group of warships like the Federation's combined navy. Or one that squabbles more. God, I can't help but love it."
- Captain Duane Inglebard, Arcadian Commonwealth Navy, 1934 EC
The Federate navies do not avoid the burden of having to coordinate with each other, either, and are just as crucial to the alliance's survival. The Federation's naval strength is embodied mainly in the Royal Edinburgh Navy, the Vinnish Continental Navy, and the Valois Marine Nationale. These three navies more or less operate in their own theaters with some overlap where needed. The Royal Edinburgh Navy (frequently shortened to the Edinburgh Navy even at an official level or the REN) for example operates primarily in the North Sea and North Atlantic sectors of the Europan theater of operations, and dominates the waters leading to and immediately around the Bharatian subcontinent. As a critical part of its strategy is to prevent the Edinburgh homeland from being completely cut off from its overseas empire and prevent any Imperial landings on its own shores, Castleton at the start of the Great War maintained the single biggest navy on the planet to keep itself secure in the face of the Reichsmarine and later the Diarchic Jeguk Haegun/Teikoku Kaigun. The Marine Nationale (MN) on the other hand kept busy during the Great War with patrolling the entire Mediterranean and the southern Atlantic primarily to detain the Reichsmarine's southern fleet in their harbors and prevent Galciana's highly maneuverable Armada Virreinal from cutting off Federate access to the region and its Nubian colonies. As with ground doctrines, each nation's naval doctrines will be covered in their respective nations' sections in more detail where possible.
Smaller Federate member states actively participated in the naval war as well, serving mainly to secure lower-priority regions to free up squadrons of larger navies for deployment in more critical zones. The Arcadian Commonwealth Navy was a very notable instance, as Arcadia's entire military was geared for naval and amphibious warfare. It frequently engaged in combat off the coast of North Nubia to trade blows with the Galcians in coordination with the Marine Nationale and the League's combined fleets. Arcadian marines and sailors also served as guards in many important Federate naval bases around the North Atlantic, freeing up additional Federate marines for more crucial actions in other regions of the world. Similarly, the Frisian Navy assisted Edinburgh in securing the North Sea, and contributed to Federate security in the East Bharacathies at the outbreak of the war. Unfortunately, this meant that much of Frisia's navy and marine corps was annihilated in the 1936 EC Diarchic campaigns in the South Pacific, with many Frisian marines and sailors spending the rest of the war in POW camps in Kokuria and Yamatai. Due to Diarchic concerns over keeping the Federation inclined even after the war toward maintaining cordial relations to isolate the East Europans, these Frisians along with other Federate POWs reportedly were treated quite adequately.
In general, Federate navies heavily rely on large numbers of surface warships to control the waves and secure supply lines, and the big three navies have their own classes of vessels with which to conduct these aforementioned operations. In particular, Federate destroyers have become increasingly ubiquitous and proficient in conducting anti-submarine warfare – an absolute necessity given the Empire's and the Diarchy's extremely potent submarine wolfpacks and the Federation's incredibly long supply lines in the oceans. Vinland alone is famous for churning out destroyers by the hundreds during the war, the Bowyer-class destroyer alone having almost two hundred vessels to comprise the single largest class of any warship in modern history. Federate warships may not have started the Great War as the most advanced machines in the oceans, but they ended it equipping guns ranging up to 600 mm in caliber, high-frequency radio detection gear, and fire control computers. Any enemy vessel that did not bend the knee in the face of increasingly advanced Federate ship designs would be forced to submit by Federate naval numerical superiority.
The Great War ultimately gifted the Vinnish Continental Navy (VCN) with primacy among Federate naval forces by 1942 EC. The early-war losses suffered by the REN in the North Sea and the Pacific, the MN's relatively small size compared to its Albanord counterparts, the sheer power of the Vinnish war machine, and the crippling losses taken by the Diarchic Navy by the end of the war contributed to the VCN becoming the single largest navy on the planet by the time the EEIA collapsed. Despite suffering a blow at the First Battle of Meridian in the Pacific in late 1936 EC that would have crippled most other navies, the VCN recouped its losses virtually tenfold by the end of the war, denying the Diarchists the ability to enjoy complete success in engaging in their campaign of bleeding the Vinns white in order to force a negotiated peace in their favor.
The Crombie
The HMS Fearnaught might be the single most influential warship design in modern Europan history (although the actual new design standard received the alternate name of "dreadnought" to avoid conflict with existing REN ship names), but the Federation came up with another warship design that at the very least offered the potential for a robust shore defense for smaller Federate member states. The crombie is a Federate-created series of warships that does one thing and one thing only – utilize excessively large naval guns for their size and patrol friendly coasts for cheap. Some (especially some of their crews) see these ships as a cruel joke, while others (again including some of their crews) see them as the best bang for their buck; the debate still continues to this day.
The first of its kind was naturally the HMS General Crombie, launched shortly after the start of the First Europan War and armed with a pair of 406 mm guns and a depth charge launcher while displacing only about as much as a cruiser at the time. The General Crombie was meant to be nothing more than a very cheap means of using an already manufactured battleship gun turret for homeland coastal defense, and was incredibly slow and fragile, but the idea caught on shockingly quickly among the smaller Federate states and colonies that could not afford extensive naval coverage of their own. In particular, the Nord Republic and the Regional Council of Tarracon requested improved, purpose-built versions of the General Crombie class for their coastal defenses, and these rather awkward-looking ships soon entered the Federate naval arsenal forever referred to collectively as crombies.
Even to the current day after the end of the Great War, several crombies continue to serve the Federation as a cheap means of putting very large guns (again up to the 600 mm range) and depth charges in the ocean. The Nord Republic and the Republic of Karjala continue to request crombies to quickly counter any Levelist resurgence in the Crystal Sea and Arctic Sea, and Tarracon steadfastly refuses to let its ones go perhaps due to popular pride. Crombies have had zero confirmed kills during the entirety of the Great War and a handful of probable kills, although naval analysts suspect that their mere presence indeed turned entire swathes of Federate coastlines into no-sail zones for the Imperial Reichsmarine, even for submarines.
The Federation's Airship Forces
"I'm not sure what's a bigger monument to man's arrogance, the fact that we've finally beaten gravity with our airships or the fact that we've instantly begun strapping weapons and armor on them."
- Kathleen Hill, Riodoran aeronautics engineer
While the first true flight of a fixed-wing aircraft outside a controlled environment is allegedly the one conducted in October 1935 EC somewhere near the Gallian capital of Randgriz, aeronautics had already been a hot topic among the engineering and scientific community for a few decades. In particular, the one realm of science the Federation can reasonably say it maintains superiority over the former EEIA and the succeeding Syndicate in is aeronautics – specifically airships.
The Federation first deployed airships during EWI, primarily to hang high over the battlefield and gather intelligence on enemy troop concentrations and movements. These rudimentary airships were not comfortable for the pilots at all, as the cabins were subject to the bitter cold of the high altitudes while they and their balloons were highly vulnerable to Imperial high-caliber artillery fire. Parachutes were not yet refined, meaning that any sort of critical mishap onboard an airship could very well have doomed all hands to a brutal, crushing death on the ground. In addition, the Empire began development of its own airships, and both sides began to mount increasingly larger weapons on their airships to deny valuable intelligence to the enemy. The Imperial high-velocity 85 mm AA gun, which would see infamy during the Great War as a feared anti-tank weapon, and these aerial knife fights forced Federate engineers to develop faster, more armored, and/or more heavily armed airships.
By 1936 EC, two major breakthroughs made manning airships not only an eminently survivable occupation but also perhaps a more comfortable service than either the army or the navy. The first major development was pressurized cabins, the cabins being more solidly integrated with the reinforced balloon and using pressurization to allow crews to breathe normally even at high altitudes. That being said, any major damage would depressurize the cabins, which meant that all crew were expected to have oxygen masks and warm clothes on hand once entering the combat zone. The second development was the parachute and ripcord system, which allowed crews to always have easily accessible and portable parachutes on their persons to survive catastrophic mishaps in the air and be retrieved for another day (or be taken prisoner to perhaps escape one day). Both breakthroughs were first achieved at the hands of Federate engineers, meaning that the aerial technology superiority the Federation pursued would remain solidly in its hands throughout the Great War.
While Valois's Atelier des Frères Montgolfier and Vinland's Phoenix Balloon Company led the charge in the Federation to manufacture the next generation of airships by the end of the Great War's first year, it was neither Valoishmen nor Vinns who truly excelled in airship use. Surprisingly, or perhaps not due to their maritime skills, the Arcadians and the Edinburghers took to air combat extremely well and extraordinarily quickly. Perhaps the similarities in how airships handled to waterborne ships of the line when it came to fighting other airships with direct-fire machine guns and autocannons helped the two ocean-going peoples process the basics and advanced techniques of airship handling far faster than others. Vinland and Valois focused primarily on heavy airships designed to withstand enemy fire and carry heavy payloads, the former's Perkins class of airships (the lead vessel later renamed the Perkunas and transferred to the Gallian Revolutionary Army, as indicated by the loyalist government using it for themselves as its aerial flagship after its victory in its civil war) as of 1937 EC being able to bear 8,000 kg of bombs or paratroopers before any armor and point defenses were installed. Arcadia and Edinburgh emphasized the use of "corsair" squadrons of lighter, faster, and nimbler airships to deny the Imperials the air superiority they so badly needed. Arcadian airships in particular proudly bore on their balloons the blue-and-white Jolly Roger design their naval strike forces in the seas raised in battle, and struck fear into the hearts of Imperial airmen. Imperial airship crews widely considered their odds in fighting Arcadians to be even only when outnumbering them by three to one.
Because of airships and their increasingly unique uses in warfare that do not neatly fit in to either the army nor the navy, the FC War Ministry put out a general recommendation in 1940 EC to all member states to reorganize their airship corps into their own separate branches. As of the time of this writing, Vinland has just created its Continental Air Force – the last nation of the pre-Great War Federation to do so. Even still, many Federate navies maintain their own smaller internal air forces mainly for coastal patrols against Syndicate and League submarines as these designs are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and able to operate for longer periods of time outside their ports.
Fixed-Wing Aircraft
While fixed-wing aircraft ("airplanes") are the new eagerly pursued niche in the international aeronautics world on account of their drastically lower costs and drastically higher maneuverability compared to airships, they did not see much action during the Great War in Federate service. For the most part, all Federate air forces relegated airplanes to fast recon roles – a role these vehicles excelled at – as these airplanes could not equip sufficiently heavy weapons to reliably bring down the increasingly armored and well-armed airships.
However, even these recon planes are reportedly beginning to take matters into their own hands when having to face their opposing counterparts. During the last years of the Great War, many stories arose of recon pilots and crews bringing small arms and light mortar shells to harass and even destroy enemy airplanes and ground troops. While the process of creating a sufficiently reliable weapons system that can be operated by the pilot in flight without damaging critical components such as propellers is still ongoing, Federate air force proponents suggest that airplanes armed with fixed machine guns and bomb racks could very well replace the airship in the near future. At the moment, the Royal Edinburgh Air Force is reportedly planning a series of airplane-on-airship mock battles to determine where to commit its post-war budget and R&D efforts.
Federate Military Intelligence
"If you want to win a battle, you damned well better know the other side. The extreme violence comes after that."
- Attributed to Tarraconese spymaster Gonçal Ignasi Junqueras, unknown year
The Federation has heavily relied on its superiority in intelligence gathering operations and techniques in its long war against the EEIA, and it plans to maintain this strength at least against the League and the Syndicate. While every Federate member state has its own intelligence apparatuses and its own preferred techniques and areas of operation, the FC Interior Ministry offers general coordination for their efforts in the fight against organizations such as the former Reichssicherheitministerium (RSM, Imperial Security Ministry), the current Syndicate SMERSH, the various intelligence agencies of the Aegean League, and even sometimes (to reportedly limited effect) the PAC's KISHIN.
As with many other FC ministries, the FC Interior Ministry does not necessarily micromanage the operations of its subsidiary national intelligence agencies. Rather, it facilitates the interior and exterior operations of these organizations through the establishment of the aforementioned BIS and BEO to achieve a certain division of labor. For exterior operations carried out in enemy and suspected enemy states, the BEO relies heavily on Edinburgh's Yard (formally the Military Intelligence Service) and its worldwide reach. The BIS in turn focuses in part on counterintelligence within Federate territories, and thus depends on Valois's Troisième Bureau (3eB) and the Vinnish Intelligence Service (VIS) to minimize the damage inflicted through enemy covert actions. Both departments of the FC Interior Ministry have the authority to request a temporary transfer of special forces units to under their control for deployment in actions that are beyond the realm of strictly military affairs.
The Federate military intelligence community notably maintained a system of double agents for use against the Empire in the run up to and during the Great War, primarily to throw chaff in the face of the RSM. The so-called Operation Collie, reportedly a joint BEO-BIS scheme and given its name for its primary objective of herding Imperial agents and military intelligence onto false conclusions and efforts, involved over twenty agents who got in touch with the RSM and offered their services to transmit "sensitive" Federate data. However, these agents despite their true employment with the FC Interior Ministry were not permitted any access to verifiable information deeper than surface level, nor were they allowed to know just how many fellow Collie agents were involved. This was done primarily to minimize the possibility of the entire double-cross operation being revealed by a badly vetted participant and forcing the Federation to commit more assets to internal counterintelligence, thereby removing resources from external espionage efforts. Collie's existence was revealed in the middle of 1942 EC, when the war was all but over and the Empire essentially non-existent; one must assume that the system was shut down at least in the short term.
Sinclair Park
Sinclair Park in the greater Castleton metropolitan area might have hosted the largest concentration of cryptologists, computer engineers, and mathematicians in Europan history. The sheer extent of Sinclair Park's contributions may not be known for several more decades on account of the Federate Council and Holyroot Palace both refusing to divulge much information on the program yet, despite the most recent leaks. However, what we can glean from the very few declassified documents related to Sinclair Park so far is that it was mainly a mass effort to decrypt the major ciphers of virtually all great power blocs involved in the Great War against the Federation. Not only was the Empire's RSM essentially spilling all of its secrets by the end of the Great War despite more than one change in ciphers, the Diarchy's KISHIN – quite possibly the most powerful intelligence service in the Great War – seems to have had some trouble fending off Sinclair Park's attempts to break its codes.
It is speculated that much of Sinclair Park's power in decryption is derived from scientists who had fled occupied Viszevary after its temporary liberation in September 1935 EC. According to what is publicly known, several machines referred to as "pucklegaps" (from pokolgejp, the Viszevaric word for "bomb") were transferred to Sinclair Park by early 1936 EC after some work by these scientists at the University of Castleton, after which these machines supposedly began processing encrypted messages at speeds previously deemed impossible on Edinburgh computers. The first set of RSM codes were reportedly broken by the autumn of 1936 EC; some breakthroughs would later be achieved against KISHIN's Baekseok cipher, but it was apparently never fully broken.
Arsenal Lease
"Destroying a Federate tank is not terribly difficult. Having to see them step right up one after another with no end in sight, however, is quite infuriating."
- Lt. Col. Ingrid von Aminow, Imperial 505th Heavy Tank Battalion "Schildbrecher," 1940 EC
The USV's Arsenal Lease program possessed an entirely fitting name. From 1935 EC all the way to the end of the Great War seven years later, Vinland produced a veritable arsenal of ammunition, small arms, tanks, dirigibles, ships, uniforms, and even basic goods such as grains, Slam canned pork, and chocolate. Not only did the Federation benefit from Vinland's seemingly bottomless pool of hardware, but the Aegean League too received Vinnish assistance as a partner in the Great War against the EEIA and its sphere – no matter how questionable the working relationship with the League was in the eyes of the Council and the General Assembly.
Arsenal Lease was not a free handout for any recipient, nor was it a single program per se. Each recipient of Arsenal Lease was required to individually negotiate with Morganston over how much aid it received, and how much it was to pay the USV back and at what pace. Federate states naturally received considerably more generous rates seeing that the USV was part of that alliance, but all recipients were ultimately on the hook for repaying war debts after the conclusion of hostilities no matter how it ended. While many in these recipient states, especially those of the League, raised bitter complaints about Vinland's war profiteering, they ultimately accepted Arsenal Lease and its conditions as an essential component to their long-term survival against Schwartzgrad.
Interestingly, Arsenal Lease was also extended to the PAC after the negotiated peace between the Ashans and the Federation in 1941 EC following the pyrrhic Federate victory at the Battle of Shikishima. As the Federation needed a relatively powerful eastern counterbalance to whatever would dominate East Europa after the war and it already had a history of cooperation with the PAC, the USV immediately offered the PAC governments in Hwando and Zhongjing immediate release of fighting vehicles and large quantities of food to comprehensively defeat the Imperials and their allies in the region. To this day, both the Diarchy and the Grand Republic of Cathay operate their Minute tanks, if only as ersatz heavy tanks and refitted with Diarchic "supervelocity" AT guns. Slam canned pork is apparently also quickly becoming a popular food item in the Kokurian half of the Diarchy, with Vinnish soldiers reporting that Slam is becoming an increasingly notable component of the local cuisine due to its longevity and ease of preparation.
To understand the sheer extent of Arsenal Lease, one must look at some numbers. Through government purchases of manufacturing licenses and their subsequent reselling at significantly reduced prices to any company with the ability to mass-produce these designs, Vinland was able to reach mind-boggling levels of output. Some numbers include hundreds of thousands of infantry AT weapons and mortars accompanied by millions of appropriate rounds of ammunition, tens of thousands of Minute and Rifleman tanks, thousands of Emancipator-class cargo ships for mass deployment and shipment of men and materiel, and millions of tons of food and ragnite products. Even the most ardent anti-Vinnish soldiers of the Federation would be hard pressed to insist that their countries could have won the Great War without the flood of Vinnish hardware, and would find it difficult to recall a time when their units did not use Vinnish-produced items in some form.
With the continuation of the East Europan Civil War, however, the USV has officially extended its grace period for Arsenal Lease repayments, or at least has allowed recipient states to begin repayment at greatly reduced rates for the time being as they rebuild and rearm in the face of the rapidly rising Levelist threat. On top of this, Morganston has officially announced the launch of the Resurrection Fund, emphasizing massive Vinnish financial and materiel assistance to the tune of over ten billion DCT to Europan members of the Federation to rapidly rebuild the war-torn continent. While the USV has never confirmed nor denied them, rumors insist that part of the reason for the Vinns' show of generosity is to deny the Levelists or the fascists any further ground in the new eastern reaches of the Federation. By minimizing the time these newly freed states experience poverty and political instability, the more likely it is that these new members of the Federation will cripple popular support for the radical Levelist and fascist elements of society who promise an alternative approach to long-term stability and prosperity.