Excerpts from “Fighting the War that Never Was; or that time INTREV did professional alternate history,” posted by RollingRoyce at net/global/http:co.na/uchronia/zine/
It’s sometimes said that we take ourselves too seriously in this hobby. Well, eat your heart out, because none of us rivet counting grognards will ever hold a candle to the 1978 Military History Symposium conducted at the behest of the INTREV Joint-General Staff.
What had begun several years ago as a simple musing of the Military-Historical Institute of the Militärakademie “Friedrich Engels” became the subject of the hitherto largest joint military exercise in history, a subject near and dear to all our hearts: Operation Jupiter, the aborted Ukrainian strategic offensive.
Jupiter was to be the natural follow-up to Mars. After breaking the back of Army Group Centre, the Joint-Stavka’s attention turned southwards to the liberation of Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Planning shifted here even as the tanks were still grinding forward west of Moscow. Capitalising on the surging number of mobilised American divisions that would be entering into the theatre in the first half of 1942, the Stavka began building up forces along the Rostov-Millerovo-Belgorod axis.
In the north, the Belgorod Front under Nikolai Vatutin would first take the vital rail junctions at Kursk and Kharkov before beginning the west-ward push to the Dnieper River. The Southwest Front under Maurice Rose would drive Southwest to Dnepropetrovsk, forcing a crossing before the Axis could dig in on the right bank of the river. The Rostov Front under Fyodor Kuznetsov would encircle the Italian First and German Sixth Armies in the city of Rostov itself, supported by marine attacks at Mariupol and the Separate Coastal Army driving north from Crimea.
It was an ambitious but well-measured plan. Scheduled to begin in late May to early June, after the spring swell of the rivers had ebbed, the plan was in its infancy, only known to the highest echelons of government and the military before events scuppered it.
A perfect storm of events occurred over the course of February 1942, placing Operation Jupiter on indefinite hiatus. The decisive Fascist coup de main in Western Europe brought the whole of the European subcontinent into Axis hands. The powerful French Army, a massive counterweight holding large German and Italian reserves down, instead struck against its own government.
With the French Métropole now in Axis hands, and Britain being chased out of the Mediterranean, it was clear that the non-aggression pact with Türkiye was not worth the paper it was written on, necessitating the shoring up of the Caucasus.
As if the prospect of thousands of additional German panzers and well-trained landsers, backed up by a French expeditionary force, heading East wasn’t bad enough, Imperial Japan would soon plunge the entirety of the Pacific into the fires of war, effectively closing the Vladivostok convoy route from April to November.
The UASR could no longer fully supply forces in theatre, let alone surge additional forces into the country. While Soviet production of war materiel, particular munitions, grew considerably over the course of 1942, it could not make up for the massive deficit. Nor could the new revolution in intermodal, containerised shipping be adopted fast enough to make up for the disruption.
Consequently, Operation Jupiter nearly disappeared from memory, remaining full classified until the statute of limitations in 1952. Even when most materials relating to the operation were declassified without challenge by the All-Union government, the documents remained largely unexplored in the archives until its unlikely resurrection years later.
Fast forward to the fall of 1974. Mikhail Kessler, then a major and graduate student at the Militärakademie, was beginning his dissertation when he stumbled upon a reference to Operation Jupiter while reviewing the minutes of a GKO meeting. Intrigued, he began to delve deeper. Some of the details, as published in his memoir, are quite amusing. Initially, he was unable to get the Soviet Army’s archives to ship documents to Dresden, as they had not yet been duplicated for preservation, nor were they willing to accommodate a Free German junior officer’s request to move them ahead in the schedule.
So instead, Kessler and a comrade piled into a 1966 Trabant Beetle for a summer road trip to Moscow, returning with the car’s suspension sagging under the weight of xeroxed copies. The effort was well worth it, because his 1975 dissertation on the operation was added to the academy commandant’s recommended reading list.
Because nothing of Operation Jupiter was ever finalised before it was cancelled, the specifics of the operation are quite hazy. The last reliable source we have is a Stavka summary dated 1 March 1942, just after planning had been ordered halted. After outlining the operational objectives of the three fronts, it summarises a total expected Soviet Army commitment of “no less than forty rifle divisions, four of the ‘brigade bucket’ tank corps, plus at least as many independent tank brigades.” The WFRA was expected to commit twelve motor rifle divisions, plus at least six tank or mechanised divisions.
Total strength was estimated at around 1.2 million when factoring in corps, army and front level assets, against an expected Axis strength between 700,000 to 900,000. Right off the bat, this tells us a lot; German force estimates are much lower than the actual offensive operations they waged in the summer and fall of the year. The total strength of Soviet forces committed at the outset of Operation Sonnenrad, the German offensive to the Don River, was also higher, though the divisions were equipped below the minimum level considered acceptable for offensive operations.
While the force multiplier from the freeing up of forces from OB West is obvious, the higher actual deployed Soviet forces in the desperate defence there gives us our first indication that Operation Jupiter was meant to be a single part of a comprehensive offensive strategy for 1942, the other components of which were in an even less developed state than Operation Jupiter. Forces that would have been utilised to lift the Siege of Leningrad were being diverted southward as early as April in response to the observed buildup of German forces.
In essence, Operation Jupiter would attempt to perform the same trick that the Second Battle of Stalingrad had: take permanent initiative in the course of the war on the Eastern Front. If this sounds familiar to my subs, it’s because it is. Every major offensive operation undertaken, from Mercury to Icebreaker to Bagration to Mars, had been an attempt by INTREV to permanently wrest the initiative from the invading forces. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again!
Leaving aside all the other factors, like the Western Front not opening up or Imperial Japan not getting involved, we’re still left with a really important missing ingredient between June 1942 and June 1943: a whole year of continual refinement of the organisation, doctrine and training of their forces. Remember in 1942 the Soviets were only just reimplementing the corps level of organisation, reducing the huge strain on the army headquarters to separately direct between eight and twelve divisions as well as numerous other units. The average fielded strength of a Soviet rifle division was still only around half that of a German division.
We all want to see the Nazis fall on our face (well…most of us do. Some of you–let’s just say I’ve got my eyes on you mate), but wishing and making it so are two different things. And it’s good that we’re seeing a lot of shifts in historical perception. Until the 90s or so, in the Entente uchronia scene our non-involvement in the war was a pretty standard feature of Nazi victory timelines.
And these stories, many of them classics of the genre, were not all right-wing! Fatherland by Robert Harris, one of the crossovers of uchronia into serious literature, is vehemently anti-Nazi, focusing its plot on a conspiracy to eliminate conspirators at the Wannsee conference within the Reich to protect relations between the Reich and the British Empire, is very intimately reflective on the policies of appeasement and collaboration with the Nazis and Britain’s culpability for the cataclysm that followed. Nevertheless, the formation of the Franco-British Union and our involvement in the war was still taken as a sort of article of faith, by writer and reader alike, as a necessary component to defeating the Third Reich.
In recent years, there’s been a revisiting of this trope, especially on Our Dear Board. And at times, I think we have overcorrected. We as amateur historians have taken to fighting the unfought battles of Operation Jupiter with great gusto, and many timelines, whether they prevent the Pétain putsch or just all together maintain longer neutrality in the West have come down on the war ending by Christmas 1943.
This is a positive trend, no doubt spurred on by the painful process of no longer feeling like the gentlemen across the Weser River are aliens in human clothing, and a trend to avoid the worst sorts of jingoism about their military competency. So while once we viewed the communists as a stumbling colossus being outfought on a man-to-man basis by the hard-fighting Germans only to overcorrect to one that lionised the heroics of our Eastern Allies, I think it’s interesting that the largest, most comprehensive professional study of Operation Jupiter came to the opposite conclusion, that the operation would have failed well-short of its objective, that the danger of a crackback after the culmination point was far too high for comfort.
Hopping back in our TARDIS to the world of 1978, it’s hard to overstate how much of a huge event the Jupiter war games were. It was not just a big deal for the officers and soldiers participating in them, they were a sort of cause celebre even in the broader public, and for more than just the usual fanfare of our Internationale is Struggling Together reasons. This was the first time that soldiers of the DBA (Deutsche Befreiungsarmee , German Liberation Army) were invited to participate in major exercises on Soviet soil. Armed Germans coming to Ukraine as guests was kind of a big thing for relations between the USSR and the FSRD.
This was the capstone for the rehabilitation of East Germans in the Comintern, a sign that they were fully trusted as part of the Internationale, and that their state did not exist as an imposed victor’s peace over the country.
And while the Jupiter war games were the centrepiece of Solidarity 78, I should note that there was a lot more going on concurrently. For example, the Luftstreitkräfte der DBA sent its elite JG-1 fighter wing to Centre 1521 Maryy, the varsity fighter weapons school, to train on new fourth generation aircraft. And Sergei Bondarchuk shot principal photography for his long awaited epic Waterloo , using the surplus of soldiers and the official cooperation of multiple governments to film the action at full scale.
Digressing back to the subject, the Jupiter segment of the symposium began with a high level war game, conducted in May and hosted on the campus of the Kiev All-Arms Higher Command School. A delegation of officers from the Engels Military Academy presented the scenario, and a delegation from the Nanjing Army Command Academy would serve as umpires. The Axis team was selected from the cream of the crop of the INTREV Northeastern Group of Forces, predominantly colonels and brigadiers hungry for their first divisional command. While drawn heavily from the DBA, a few notable American officers took part, including Our Dear Board’s favourite H.S. Thompson.
INTREV forces were played by the up and coming officers from the Alma-Ata, Kiev, and Ural military districts; administrations which played a central role in combined arms military training and development. Most notable of their ranks is Vadim Rogovin, future commander of the Azanian Expeditionary Force.
Details on the order of battle are fairly sparse in public domain literature presently. While I’m sure it would win a freedom of information request, as of yet no one has bothered to publish primary sources on the world wide web. But from what I’ve been able to gather from secondary sources, the exercise had a slightly modified order of battle from the last preliminary plans. Rifle corps return to the orders of battle, and the Soviet tank corps follow a late 1942 spec, with each tank brigade augmented with a motor rifle battalion.
The German order of battle was prepared by the Engels Academy’s historical department, and represents a good estimate of German dispositions under the premise that INTREV maskirovka successfully obfuscated the operation’s existence until two weeks before D-Day and tactical objectives until two days prior.
The exercise was run on a modified version of the INTREV’s ISO 4182:1975 wargaming system, a stripped down version of which is known commercially as the Operational Art map game. Computational assistance was provided by several PARC Alto MSAC computers, a then state of the art minicomputer with a megabyte of RAM and a megapixel display.
The exercise simulated a one month long offensive phase. At the conclusion of the time limit, which would take seven days, umpires would render a final judgement, scoring based on the feasibility of unmet objectives. Players worked over sixteen hours per day, sleeping a few hours here and there, simulating the stress of real operational environments.
The outcome was a disappointment for the good guys. By the official judgement of the umpires, the Wehrmacht team was judged to have won a narrow tactical victory. Their forces maintained cohesion, and were able to thwart outright the INTREV team’s scoring objective to facilitate the encirclement and probable destruction of at least one of the field armies, with the German divisions weighted fifty percent higher than an Italian, and twice that of a Romanian or Hungarian.
While some commentators have objected to the lack of a “no-retreat” order hindering the German players, in real-life Hitler’s Führer directives were not so absolute in 1942, with many officers finding ways of creative compliance when the situation on the ground. And while INTREV was able to reach the Dnieper, by the close of the operation the Wehrmacht held three of the four scoring bridgeheads. Taken together with the losses incurred, the umpires ruled that the possibility of counterattack remained high.
Probably the more fascinating part of the Jupiter war games is the field exercises and second round of war games that followed. Even as the tactics and weapons get revolutionised, the last war still prefigures expectations of the next war. Jupiter-78, as it was called, was one of the largest peacetime exercises conducted by INTREV, and differed from the usual trend by largely involving reserve troops and officers. While cadrist formations were involved, about two-thirds of the Soviet units that took part (the largest national contingent) were from the Class B or C manpower categories. That is to say, divisions that in peacetime are kept at either ~50 percent or ~25 percent manpower strength respectively.
In this way, Jupiter-78 served as a stress test for the whole mobilisation system, from the calling up of reservists to their depots, processing them into units for refresher training, and the movement of forces to the theatre of operations.
So imagine, if you will, a bunch of reservists being called up from across the USSR, all being funnelled into the bustling cities of Ukraine for several months of service, meeting new comrades from all over the world. I’ve been told from first-hand accounts that the subject notwithstanding, the general atmosphere was a bit more like the Olympics, particularly with regard to the amount of fornication going on.
Jupiter-78 would refight a never fought campaign from the Second World War with modern weapons and a simulated nuclear battlefield. An enemy attempting to dig-in themselves in Eastern Ukraine, the “Circle Trigonist” aggressors from INTREV’s long-running parallel narrative world, would be counterattacked by a coalition of Soviet, Chosunese and Zhonghuan forces. American and East German units would stand-in for the aggressors.
In the sources I have read on the subject, I am left with a single, burning question: did they try doing the accent? Inquiring minds must know. If you were there, or know someone who was, I desperately need to know how into character the aggressor units were. I know some blokes get offended by it, but please, Yanks never stop. That fake RP you do, it’s great, especially when it comes from characters branded with the mark of going to state schools.
With that digression out of the way, the other difficulty in studying Jupiter-78 is how thoroughly serious accounts are obfuscated by search engine chaff. Since it’s the first large-scale use of the MILES training system, which uses the same operating principles of Lasertag to improve the fidelity of training engagements, one has to wade through a sea of computer science and engineering related hits unless one has access to academic databases, and unfortunately most relevant journal articles are not available in digital form yet.
This was no barrier for me, old enough to know how to do things the old-fashioned way, but I have noticed a creeping wikiception on more publicly available discussions. It did not reveal, as many pop history commenters have insisted, serious problems in the communist military establishment. No, it is not the reason why they didn’t go for the Last Crusade when the Falklands Incident kicked off. What’s remarkable about Jupiter-78 is how unremarkable it was in terms of findings.
The military mobilisation system was functioning as intended. Reservists were able to integrate in with cadrists, even in the training environment. Professional and reserve echelons fought together well because ongoing reservist training was effective. As with all things, there was room for improvement. But even neutral military attachés observing or researching the subject found the field exercise was umpired with great scrutiny. Some units did better than others; the Zhonghuan 42nd Mechanised Division (which carries the legacy of the famed 2nd Division of the New Fourth Army) did notably well in taking its objectives quickly and with minimal casualties.
What is notable about it, I think, is how we talk about generals always re-fighting the last war. And here I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The Second World War went poorly enough for the Communists that they remain very aware of how badly things can go. Seriously fighting an operation where the enemy had occupied core French territory would be unthinkable for us. We all knew before the 80s, from the Prime Minister on down, that if the war went hot and West Germany was overrun, we would exercise the Samson Option and pull the temple down around us, and that’d be all she wrote for human civilization.
By contrast, they seem much more aware that mutually assured destruction can fail, that counterforce strategies that all the major powers have taken could push us into the nightmare scenario of a broken-back war, that the ladder of escalation has many rungs before we find the will to end it all. It took the crises of the Long 80s for us to realise we weren’t quite ready to end the world just yet, even as we fought an undeclared war with each other across the entirety of the Global South. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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