Chapter 256: Backstabbing Allies Is a Britannian Dog Tradition That Simply Must Be Sampled |
After Marshal Leopold resolved to secure the south first, the Italian situation unfolded in the remaining days of early June exactly as Lelouch had foreseen.
The Frankish infiltration into Italian territory was halted within Piedmont and Liguria, the two northwesternmost slices of the country. Even then, only Piedmont was fully occupied; in Liguria, the Frankish forces held only the primary urban centers.
In other words, Turin and Genoa were the only major cities under Frankish control. The total population across their zone stood at roughly 4.3 million—3.5 million in Piedmont and another 1.2 million across Liguria, though the Frankish reach stopped at Genoa, giving them authority over only about 800,000 residents there.
The German-controlled zone in Italy, meanwhile, was restricted to the northern regions of Lombardy, Veneto, and Bologna, along with newly annexed Tuscany. This territory encompassed a population of 21 million: 10 million in Lombardy, 5 million in Veneto, 3.3 million in Bologna, and 2.8 million in Tuscany. Veneto itself was encircled, though not yet entirely pacified.
Given that Italy's total population was only 35 million, leaving the southern sectors with a mere 10 million people, any organized state-level resistance was effectively over. From this point forward, the Italians could rely on little more than spontaneous civilian resistance.
The Demanian advance into Tuscany was executed between June 6 and June 10.
On June 6, their units crossed the northern hills of the Apennine Peninsula into Florence, arriving in Pisa on June 8. Yet, a day before the Demanian Army reached Pisa, Frankish forces sliding southeast down the coast from Genoa had already pushed into the city.
Before the Franks could find their footing or establish proper defensive lines, they slammed directly into the two armored divisions led by von Bock and Rundstedt, arriving hard on their heels.
Neither von Bock nor his colleagues hesitated; they threw their armored divisions into an immediate assault.
"Tanks! The Demanian armor is here! Deploy the artillery batteries, quickly!"
"Where is our armor? Push them to the front! Hold those Demanian tanks and buy the main force time to deploy!"
Chaos erupted across the Frankish command network. Telegrams jammed the lines between front and rear, and radio frequencies were flooded with a mess of frantic transmissions.
The first tank-versus-tank engagement in human history broke out right there, outside the Italian city of Pisa.
One side advanced in the Panzer I; the other charged in the Renault 16.
To their credit, the Frankish tank crews fought with stubborn courage. Their fatal flaw lay in their tactical doctrine: like the Britannians, the Franks treated these first-generation machines as infantry support vehicles rather than massing them as a concentrated armored spearhead.
The three divisions of the Frankish vanguard had been assigned just one company of tanks each—roughly fifteen vehicles per division.
Against a Demanian force fielding more than a hundred, even two hundred tanks concentrated within a single armored division, such piecemeal deployment was inevitably crushed by sheer numbers.
At the opening clash, the Franks actually drew first blood. Their 37mm guns boasted longer barrels and higher muzzle velocities; while their armor-penetration roughly matched the Demanian 57mm short-barreled cannon, that extra velocity meant superior range, less lead required on moving targets, and far greater accuracy.
As the Demanian armor closed the distance, the Franks knocked out four tanks early on. But once the gap shrunk from eight hundred meters down to under five hundred, the overwhelming Demanian numbers took control of the field.
More than half of the fifteen Frankish tanks were destroyed outright. The surviving three threw their machines into reverse, breaking contact to preserve what was left.
When the smoke cleared, each Frankish division had lost fifteen tanks to the Demanians' seven—four picked off at long range at the start, and three lost in the close-quarters melee that followed.
Major General von Bock found the exchange unsatisfactory, but his sharp tactical eye caught the core problem immediately: their Panzer I units were still carrying ultrashort 57mm guns. The weapon had been built to fire high-explosive rounds into earth-and-timber fortifications, not to duel enemy armor. He resolved to press his old colleague Lelouch on when that planned 20mm autocannon would finally be mounted on the new chassis.
Elsewhere along the front, the 3rd Armored Division—with Brigadier General Rundstedt and Manstein in command—fought a brisk skirmish of its own. Just as before, the enemy pushed their armor forward in a desperate bid for time; leading from the front, Manstein routinely steamrolled a force carrying barely a fifth of his strength.
Midway through the fighting, however, Manstein spotted something unusual.
His thrust had cut so deep and so fast that the trailing Frankish echelon never even had time to form up. After shredding several skirmish lines, Manstein noticed a handful of peculiar Renault tanks parked behind the enemy formations.
Studying them through his periscope, he was struck by their bizarre silhouette and immediately barked orders for his crews to concentrate fire on the targets.
Aiming a main tank gun in this era was no simple task. Crews had to traverse the hull until the coaxial machine gun aligned with the target, fire a few bursts of tracer rounds to correct their windage, manually adjust the gun's elevation, and finally pull the lanyard on the main cannon.
Firing cold without machine-gun spotting wasted precious ammunition and suffered from agonizingly slow reload times.
Manstein insisted his crews follow manual doctrine to the letter. But the moment the tracers found their mark, something extraordinary happened.
No sooner had the coaxial machine gun of a Demanian tank walked a burst of 7.92mm rounds across one of those strange enemy hulls than the entire machine erupted into a towering fireball. The blast eclipsed even a 150mm high-explosive detonation.
Manstein stared through his viewport, stunned by the sight of a machine gun converting an enemy tank into a localized inferno.
It wasn't a fluke. Over the course of the engagement, three of those peculiar machines vanished in identical, violent explosions.
Out of a four-vehicle company, only the last surviving unit managed to frantically throw itself into reverse and present its rear armor, narrowly avoiding an instant ammunition cook-off. After putting up a desperate fight that claimed one Panzer I, it was finally disabled and captured by Manstein's advancing tank regiment.
Curiosity getting the better of him, Manstein climbed down from his command vehicle once the field was secured to inspect the wreckage.
What he found was a Renault 16 chassis modified to carry a single 75mm Schneider rapid-fire field gun—the M1897, famously dubbed Mademoiselle 75.
The layout mirrored a standard towed artillery piece hitched to a truck: the driver sat at the front for maximum visibility while the barrel pointed straight over the rear deck.
To fire, the crew had to spin the entire vehicle around one hundred and eighty degrees so the barrel faced the enemy and the cab faced the rear, drop the heavy recoil spades into the dirt, and deploy just like a conventional battery. (See image below)
Anyone familiar with modern self-propelled artillery would scoff at such a backward arrangement—later SPGs mounted forward-facing barrels without sacrificing the driver's vision.
Yet this was only 1916. The Renault 16 had barely been rolling off assembly lines for a few months, and these first crude Frankish experiments naturally imitated traditional towed pieces by facing the gun backward.
In a marching column caught by ambush, however, that layout proved fatal. With the cab facing forward and completely unarmored, the driver was essentially riding fully exposed into battle.
Worse still, the open cab doubled as the ammunition rack. Forty rounds of 75mm high-explosive shells were stacked on iron shelves directly behind the driver's seat.
Deployed properly with its armored gun shield facing the enemy, the machine held its own. But caught on the march with its soft, unprotected cab turned toward the guns, a single sweep of machine-gun fire was enough to slaughter the driver and detonate the entire magazine.
In the original timeline, the Frankish army wouldn't field self-propelled artillery until mid-1918—well after the Renault FT-17 had proven itself. But driven by the crushing urgency of this war and the rapid escalation of technical theft between both sides, the Renault 16 had arrived a full year early. Because mounting a gun on a flat chassis bypassed the complex engineering required for a rotating turret, the Franks had thrown together a handful of these self-propelled guns almost simultaneously.
Desperate to rush a rapid reaction force into Italy for the land grab, the Frankish command had handed all four of the army's only Renault 75mm Self-Propelled Guns to the vanguard—creating the first self-propelled artillery company in their army's history.
Instead of glory, they stumbled headlong into a Demanian armored division while still on the road and were wiped out before they could even spin around to drop their spades.
Those three massive fireballs Manstein had watched erupt across the battlefield were the simultaneous secondary detonations of forty 75mm shells each.
"What kind of garbage are the Franks building? The concept itself is fascinating, but this armor protection is a bad joke. Unload whatever shells are left on that capture, tow the wreck back to rear echelon, and have the engineers at Porsche study the layout. Mounting long-range artillery directly on tracked chassis is going to be indispensable down the line."
Once he had examined the prize, Manstein ordered his men to secure the wreckage and ship it rearward for analysis.
With the sharp instincts of a frontline armor commander, he could already see the tremendous future potential inherent in self-propelled artillery.
The Franks had designed a machine that was rigid and inflexible—like gluing the bridges of a zither to play it—but once the fatal flaws in layout and protection were ironed out, the concept would change the battlefield.
The armored clash outside Pisa amounted to little more than a violent footnote in the broader scramble for northern Italy between Demania and Francia.
Two days of relentless maneuvering shattered the Frankish vanguard entirely, sending only a handful of ragged survivors fleeing back toward Genoa.
The Demanians lacked the strength to mount a counter-offensive against Genoa itself. Having failed to push east, the Franks threw every resource they had into fortifying the city, abandoning any thought of further territorial expansion.
Once the Franks dug in behind heavy fortifications—backed by total naval supremacy in the Ligurian Sea that kept their supply lines open from behind—the Demanian Army had no desire to throw men against an enemy holding all the geographical advantages.
The Demanians had far more pressing objectives demanding their attention elsewhere.
As a result, the fight at Pisa stood as the only major clash between Demanian and Frankish forces throughout the Italian campaign.
(Note: The schematic map of the Italian campaign and the partition occupation map are as shown below.)
While the Demanian and Frankish armies carved up the northwest, the Italian navy kept busy through those final days of early June.
Once word arrived on June 1 that the remnants of two army groups were trapped inside the Venetian pocket with no hope of breaking out, panic gripped the southern government in Rome. Marshal Luigi Cadorna, Chief of General Staff, convened a hasty conference and formally petitioned the navy to run transports into Venice to evacuate the encircled troops.
Knowing the Demanians maintained no naval presence in the Adriatic Sea and that their only opposition would come from the Austrian fleet, the navy agreed to support the operation.
On June 3, the Duke of the Abruzzi, commander-in-chief of the Italian navy, officially ordered a high-speed task force to escort a number of transport vessels to the port of Venice for the rescue mission. (This duke was the cousin of King Emanuele III; in the Earth timeline during the 1930s, the Italian navy built a class of light cruisers named after him, called the Duca degli Abruzzi-class cruisers.)
His directives explicitly authorized destroyer squadrons to enter the harbor directly and take on soldiers if the situation demanded.
Conventional transports simply steamed too slowly, and the lightning pace of the Demanian Army's advance left no room for hesitation; the south desperately needed every veteran they could pull from that pocket to staff the mountain defenses along the Apennine lines.
With only a hundred-odd thousand men trapped in the city, packing them like sardines across destroyer decks—a thousand men per hull—promised a swift, clean evacuation.
By 1916, the Italian naval register boasted six battleships, five pre-dreadnoughts, eight armored cruisers, five light cruisers, fourteen obsolete protected cruisers, thirty-five destroyers, roughly sixty torpedo boats, and twenty submarines.
Across the water, the Austrian navy fielded only four battleships, seven pre-dreadnoughts, three armored cruisers, four light cruisers, ten obsolete protected cruisers, forty-two destroyers, and fifteen submarines.
Holding roughly a three-to-two scale advantage over the Austrians, the Italians carried a comfortable psychological edge and felt little fear of a sortie.
Furthermore, the Austrian Viribus Unitis-class battleships ran two knots slower than the newest Italian capital ships, making a successful interception unlikely.
Following the Duke's orders to the letter, the Italian fleet weighed anchor from Taranto and other southern bases on the afternoon of June 3 and steamed north.
The voyage covered roughly seven hundred kilometers—just over four hundred nautical miles—meaning a fleet cruising at sixteen knots would reach the objective in a little over twenty-four hours.
Yet barely a day into the passage, disaster struck. Several obsolete protected cruisers struck mines just dozens of nautical miles outside Venice harbor. Two took on water rapidly and foundered, while a third limped crippled into Ancona for emergency drydock repairs.
It took hours of frantic investigation before the Italian command realized what had happened: Demanian airships had slipped over the sea under cover of darkness to drop minefields from the sky, silently turning waters never touched by Austrian keels into lethal traps.
Lacking the time and equipment for sweep operations, the Italian fleet ground to an indecisive halt.
Sensing their hesitation, the Austrian navy—yielding for once to the demands of their Demanian allies—sortied from port to force an engagement.
A violent, hour-long gun duel erupted across the coastal waters south of Venice.
On paper, the Italian navy possessed superior firepower, but the psychological shock of watching three cruisers crippled by unseen mines had broken their nerve.
Terrified of drifting into uncharted minefields, their captains fought cautiously, refusing to maneuver aggressively northward toward the enemy.
Capitalizing on the terrain and the enemy's hesitation, the Austrians traded an obsolete Monarch-class pre-dreadnought—hardly more than a coastal defense vessel carrying two single-barrel 283mm main guns on a displacement under seven thousand tons—alongside two old protected cruisers to sink an Italian Roma-class pre-dreadnought, three Pisa-class armored cruisers, and an aging protected cruiser.
Combined with the casualties from the minefield, the Italians lost eight hulls against three Austrian losses, even if only one was a capital ship.
Neither side lost a modern dreadnought, making the engagement materially insignificant for capital fleet balance, but the moral defeat shattered the Italian navy's fighting spirit.
From that moment on, Italy was no longer a nation victorious at sea but defeated on land; they were defeated on both sea and land, dealing a devastating blow to the country's will to resist.
Humiliated in the waters between Venice and Ancona, the Italians shelved the rescue operation, deploying small craft for painstaking minesweeping while dispatching desperate pleas for reinforcement to their Britannian allies.
The Frankish navy in the Mediterranean could not reach them in time; setting out from Marseille meant steaming all the way south around the Italian boot before pushing back north into the Adriatic—a run of nearly two thousand kilometers.
By contrast, the Britannia Eastern Mediterranean Fleet maintained substantial squadrons anchored in Crete and Malta, positioned just a stone's throw from the Adriatic Sea.
(Note: Greece had already announced its withdrawal from the war and resumed neutrality last year, but Crete and a few other islands were still occupied by the Britannian Army and could not be reclaimed. The Greek navy was no match for Britannia, and the Demanian Navy was temporarily unable to help Greece launch a landing operation to retake these islands.)
Facing the total collapse of the Italian front, the Britannia Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet petitioned the Admiralty for orders. The newly appointed First Lord quickly authorized the Eastern Mediterranean squadrons to steam immediately for Italian waters.
Should the Mediterranean Fleet find itself stretched thin by the diversion, the Admiralty promised to detach capital reinforcements directly from the Home Fleet.
Beginning June 7, the main force of the Britannia Royal Navy stationed in Crete raised steam and headed north, entering the Port of Taranto to prepare for joint operations alongside the Italians.
"What? The Britannia Mediterranean Fleet out of Crete and Malta are already steaming north to concentrate at Taranto?"
"I didn't expect it to go down this smoothly. The Italian campaign isn't even wrapped up yet, and we've already baited the Britannia Royal Navy into shifting their formations."
Lelouch received the intelligence late around midnight on June 8; he was no clairvoyant and had to rely on delayed field reports.
With the Mediterranean Fleet clearing out of its eastern anchorages, Lelouch saw his window and struck.
That very day, he dispatched two courier aircraft across the Mediterranean toward Osman, carrying a personal coordination letter for Vice Admiral Spee—waiting patiently near the Dardanelles—to initiate the Munich Express.
After eight hours of relay flying across twelve hundred kilometers—interrupted only by a brief one-hour refueling stop—the aircraft dropped Lelouch's coordination letter directly into Spee's hands.
Though technically issued by the Joint Army-Navy Operations Coordination Office, Spee held standing orders from Admiral Tirpitz. He knew Lelouch's grand strategy carried the full backing of His Majesty and the army and navy; the arrival of that piece of paper was his signal to move.
Wasting no time, Spee ordered every high-speed warship in the Black Sea Fleet to clear the Dardanelles, enter the Aegean Sea, and run east along the northern coast of Asia Minor toward the port of Alexandretta.
Every hull in his task force had been selected for its ability to sustain speeds above twenty-six knots—restricting the force entirely to battlecruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers.
Pre-dreadnoughts, armored cruisers, and aging protected cruisers were left behind; even modern dreadnoughts would have been excluded for slowing the pace, though the Black Sea Fleet currently fielded none.
Every available square inch of those racing warships was packed with critical combat logistics and reinforcement personnel bound for the Middle East theater.
Clearing the Dardanelles on the morning of June 9, the Spee Fleet pushed their boilers to the limit, exiting the Aegean within twelve hours and making landfall at Alexandretta late in the night of June 10.
Alexandretta sat directly on a rail link running straight to Mosul and Baghdad. The sudden arrival of sealifted munitions and supplies instantly broke the logistical stranglehold choking the Demania-Austria Coalition forces in the Middle East, guaranteeing a violent shift in the theater's strategic balance.
More importantly, Spee's fleet brought Lelouch the Greater Demania Armored Division, pulled directly from refit camps in the Caucasus with Rommel still acting as division commander.
The division had suffered terrible attrition during the brutal fighting at Baku. Ordered to rush the city before Lusha demolition teams could torch the oil fields and refineries, their tanks had been thrown directly into meat-grinder urban assaults, costing over a hundred hulls.
Though the unit had not yet fully rebuilt its hardware inventory—leaving Rommel with roughly sixty Panzer I units and four hundred motorized support vehicles—its troop rosters were at full strength.
Given Rommel's tactical genius in armored warfare, sixty Panzer I tanks were more than enough to turn the arid expanses of the Middle East into a slaughterhouse.
Besides, the fragile supply lines of the desert could hardly sustain a larger armored force anyway. Against camel-mounted tribal insurgents whipped into a frenzy by McMahon and Lawrence, or against second-line Britannian colonial garrisons, this handful of tanks was more than enough.
"With the Italian campaign still unresolved, the Demanian Navy has launched a daring operation, sealifting an entire armored division and massive stockpiles of materiel directly into Alexandretta. Britannia's army garrisons across Egypt and Basra are in grave peril."
Reports of this nature quickly circulated through the high commands of Britannia, Francia, and the allied powers.
Worse yet, the Italians stood on the brink of total capitulation. The Britannians had no choice but to draft emergency contingencies for an Italian surrender.
Following intense deliberations, the Admiralty issued urgent orders on June 12: detach high-speed capital ships from the Home Fleet and send them south immediately! They were commanded to secure maritime supremacy across the eastern Mediterranean and attempt the destruction of the Demanian Black Sea Fleet built around those two Moltke-class battlecruisers—or at the very least drive Spee back into the Black Sea!
Leaving Spee to roam the eastern Mediterranean unchecked threatened more than just the Middle East front; it posed an existential danger to Egypt and the Suez Canal, the absolute lifeblood of the empire.
Beyond that primary objective, this southbound Britannian fast squadron carried a second, highly classified directive: monitor the Italian navy closely. Should Italy collapse and sue for peace with Demania, the Royal Navy was ordered to ensure those Italian warships never fell into enemy hands!
